


From Deep Roots

by Anefi



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Ace Kira, Alive Vernon Boyd & Erica Reyes, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Magic Science, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Monster of the Week, Pack Dynamics, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Build, Walks In The Woods, except more like a number of monsters scheduled inconveniently, kind of an alternate 3b, post-s3a, tags will be added as things happen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2018-10-17 23:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 70,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10604745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anefi/pseuds/Anefi
Summary: They’re still Derek’s woods. After a long year and a quiet winter, they’ve started to wake up.





	1. Barriers

**Author's Note:**

> Additional tags and rating changes as things happen! I can't make any promises about an update schedule, but I'm aiming for about once a ~~week~~ month.
> 
> General warnings for the fic: Derek is grieving for Laura and his family and isn't always super healthy about it. It's not a main focus of the fic, but this is Derek-centric, so it happens, and other people who have been through traumatic events are still dealing with them too. Canon noncon with the darach will be mentioned, but not explicitly shown. Canon-typical level of occasional horror. Specific warnings will be posted in the end notes for each chapter, but if you have questions or concerns, leave a comment or hit me up on tumblr! also let me know if you think I should warn for anything that I miss. Some characters and references from seasons 3b and 4 will be included and might count as spoilers, but everything unfolds very differently from canon. I hope that this still makes sense if you haven't seen 3b or quit in the middle—if anyone wants to let me know one way or the other, I would appreciate it!

The familiar growl of an old engine carried up the sharp slopes of the preserve to where Derek was shoveling loose soil and uprooted weeds to the downhill side of a tree. He stood up, stuck the shovel in the ground, brushed off his hands on his jeans, and slapped dusty earth from where it had settled on his pants and worn tee. He frowned at the new angle and shallow dip he’d cut above the struggling hackberry, not sure it would catch enough rainfall to make a difference, but the sound was distinctive. A slow inhale brought him the smell of the woods – mostly pine, up here – but the hiking trail blocking water from the hackberry intruded with the smell of new gravel and people and dogs. He let out a sigh, picked up the shovel, and headed back toward the house at an easy run. 

The early spring had been too dry, and though the preserve was always cooler than the town, it was unseasonably warm. More dust rose from the litter of moldering leaves to catch the sunlight in his wake, and a brittle edge held to some of the new green growth. Derek’s feet fell lightly enough not to spook squirrels until they saw him. It had been a family game, when he was little, seeing who could get closest, get the best reaction; he and Laura had been pretty even, but their mother always won. He loped past familiar trees and bounced off worn rocks, the way open and clear as a marked trail, until he made it to the line of unruly bushes overgrown where the trees used to meet the lawn.

The shovel had a hole in the handle that fit over a hook in the weathered tool shed. Derek hung it up and went for a bottle of water from the case on his dad’s potting bench. The plastic stretched tight over the back half of the case split easily under a claw, and he pulled a bottle free, drained it, put back the empty. After securing the shed’s outside latch, he turned toward the burned out, shot up, desolate ruin of his family’s home. Unshakeable habit pulled him across the yard and up the back steps, and he focused on the crunch of tires, creak of brakes, and poppy music out front as he ghosted around the charred hanging rafters and holes in the floor. He surfaced from the shadows in time to cross his arms at Stiles from the decaying front porch. 

The lanky teenager was humming to himself and bobbing his head as he spilled out of his ancient Jeep, though not the song that had just been playing, or anything particularly recognizable as music. He looked up from straightening his twisted shirt and flannel and startled in the slightly spastic way that Derek always found a little gratifying. “Hey, Creeperwolf,” he said, waving.

Derek scowled, the only possible response. 

Stiles grinned back, taking that as the friendly welcome it basically was. He ambled toward the house. “Why are you always here, dude? It’s depressing.”

Derek raised his eyebrows. “How else would you know where to find me?” 

“Oh, good question, hmm, let’s see,” Stiles made a show of thinking about it, and Derek could almost hear his brain whir as he re-evaluated whether Derek could have figured out he’d been tracking his phone GPS for months. “How about the same way I find anybody else: with strings of text and emojis transmitted via cellular network to your portable phone,” he covered. Derek hid a smirk as Stiles bounded up the steps. His cell phone was in the back of the car, next to where Stiles had parked, but he always brought it at least that far.

“Plausible,” Derek said, “but I hate emoji.” He stepped back to make sure Stiles would follow into the shade of the porch, since he didn’t smell like sunscreen.

Stiles snorted. “Of course you do, you’re allergic to fun.” He turned and draped himself against one of the more stable posts, stretched to rest his head in a way that Derek thought couldn’t possibly be comfortable. Long fingers reached up to scratch behind his ear and smooth down his nape, an aggravating habit developing as he let the rest of his hair get longer and started to spike it. The buzz cut growing out was—it was fine. It was longer. Stiles wasn’t going to stop messing with it. He was scanning the trees, so he didn’t notice Derek’s eyes dart away. “I’ll wear you down with exposure therapy,” he was saying. “It worked for getting you to at least reply to texts with texts like a normal person, instead of jumping out of the shadows five minutes later.”

Derek didn’t bother trying not to roll his eyes. It wasn’t _just_ a pathological drive to make sure everyone was safe, if half the time they needed something anyway. And maybe it took him a while to get used to typing on a phone. So what. “As if you know anything about what normal people do,” he said.

“Expertise hard-won through observation as an outsider,” Stiles countered. The corners of his mouth were teasing toward another smile. “What are you doing today?”

“Upkeep.”

Stiles turned and gave him a disbelieving squint, followed by a deliberate look around the wreck of the house and abandoned yard. “Fine, whatever, top secret, I see how it is.” 

Derek looked to the sky for patience, frowned when he was thwarted by the smoky beadboard of the porch roof. “What do you want, Stiles?”

Now he might have been embarrassed. “Uh.” He started to pick at his nail beds.

Derek waited him out. It seemed like Stiles was doing well, today, bright-eyed and not too jumpy.

“So you know I have this… spark.” Stiles intently examined his hands, snuck a look at Derek’s. Derek used one to gesture to get on with it. 

“And I guess a lot of magic stuff depends on like, belief. Or whatever. The power of positive thinking.” His eyes were very fixed on his cuticles.

“Sure.” Derek waited more.

“But then some things also have to be really actually real to carry power, like, mountain ash barriers against supernatural people can’t be made with any random pile of dust.” His eyes met Derek’s. “Right?” His leg started to bounce, the toe of his shoe catching between the slats of the porch.

This was actually something Derek had thought about a lot, running at night, when he couldn’t sleep. Twelve people had died in the five-fold knot, and the darach had been following a well-worn path. “As far as you know, anyway,” he pointed out.

Stiles’s leg stopped like a switch had been hit. “What do you mean?”

“Where did that mountain ash come from?”

“Deaton.”

“Right,” Derek said. “Deaton had a jar with a label on it, and he said, ‘The stuff with this label can be used for these things.’” Derek watched Stiles’s eyes flash absurdly wide. “And you _believed_.”

Stiles’s mouth dropped open. “You paranoid bastard.” He sounded a little bit in awe.

Derek shrugged, looking away. “Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe that’s what _Deaton_ believes it is.”

“Maybe Deaton gets it from a guy who…” His arm flailed in a new direction. “Maybe a whole _bunch_ of guys all believe the same things about the _same stuff_ and _that’s_ what makes it work!” He was turned toward Derek completely now, bouncing on his toes.

“Sure. Maybe at some point, enough cumulative belief makes anything true.” Derek’s brows drew together and his gaze drifted out to the trees. “Maybe someone out there can pick up any pile of dust and believe really hard that it’s mountain ash, and it will be.” His lips pressed together, twisted grimly. “Maybe that person could decide what mountain ash could do.”

“That would be cool as hell!” Stiles beamed, but his smile twisted as he thought it through. “And unbelievably terrifying, in the wrong hands. As if I don’t already have enough trouble telling what’s real.”

Derek flicked his eyes up at him and back down, evaluating stealthily. He rolled his shoulders and raised his head. “Well, we don’t _know_ anything. Some stuff seems to work. Who can say why? There has to be a balance. That has to matter. Or one entitled asshole really good at lying to themselves could do anything.”

Stiles shot him a wry look. “I would say thanks for your vote of confidence, but I’m not sure that’s what that was,” he said. “Ugh. I need like, a whole pile of books.”

Derek sighed. “Just be careful about who’s telling you what. And why.”

Stiles nodded absently and leaned against the side of the house, where he started peeling off splinters of dry rot. “So uh. Good segue.” He took a deep breath, head bent toward where his fingers worried at the wood, and let out his next words in a rush of breath. “Do you think I could maybe practice magic on you?” He flinched hard at his own words, and Derek took a shocked step back, his hands out defensively. “WITH you, I mean with you. I just want to mess around with—oh my god. No.” His hands flew up to scrape through his hair. He screwed his eyes shut. “Would you help me. Practice. Using mountain ash.”  He looked up, wincing, waiting to be thrown off the property. “Please?”

Derek’s arms eased down by increments. He kept his voice carefully free of inflection. “You want to train your spark.”

Stiles nodded frantically. “Yes! It’s like the one thing I can do in a fight, besides crash my Jeep or swing a bat. Barriers! Useful!” He gestured between them. “I can be useful.”

“CPR,” Derek said, but he caught Stiles’s quick grimace, still unreasonably guilty about breaking a few of Cora’s ribs while keeping her alive. He thought Stiles was underselling his usefulness, but he understood the need to know he’d done all he could. Still, he hesitated. “You want to train with me.”

“Well, Scott’s got,” Isaac, he didn’t say. “He’s busy.” That probably came out more bitter than Stiles had meant it to be. He and Derek avoided looking at each other. “Which is fine. In fact, it’s great. Other people are finally realizing how great Scott is and that is… great.” He glared into the trees. “He's being weird about it, anyway, he keeps telling me I don’t need to. Which, obviously I don't have to, I know that. But I can. So. I should.” He glanced back at Derek’s shoes. “But if I bug Deaton any more, I think he’s going to calmly murder me. Which means…” he aimed a finger-gun at Derek and clicked his tongue to fire.

Derek wondered how many of the other wolves he would have asked first, if Cora and Erica and Boyd had been closer than South America, if Jackson wasn’t in London. His hand came up to rub the center of his chest with his fingertips, where strong pack bonds should have felt like a warm hum beside his heart.

“Ah. I see how it is,” Derek almost joked. “Bottom of the barrel.” He inhaled the smells of ruin and char and musky burrows under the verandah, of creeping shoots and strangers, of gunpowder and old blood, mold and sick rot.

“I mean, you—”

“Okay,” he said, as if it was any choice. “Fine. But not here.” He turned abruptly and dropped off the end of the porch, striding toward the tree cover without waiting to see if Stiles followed.

“What, really?” After a moment of surprise or indecision, Stiles scrambled after him. “Wait!” he called. “Let me get the—” he leaned into the Jeep and dug a beat-up olive messenger bag out of the back. He threw it over his shoulder as he ran, tangled himself in the strap, unbalanced mid-step, almost fell, recovered with no grace whatsoever, and arrived panting to where Derek had stopped to let him catch up.

Derek’s eyebrows had climbed steadily through the performance, and he couldn’t hold back a smirk. “Whenever you’re ready.”

“Shut up,” Stiles groused, pulling the bag to hang more comfortably as they set out into the woods.

As soon as they were under even a sparse cover of oak and pines, Derek felt himself ease. He had been crossing through the area often enough since he got back that it was starting to feel like his own again. There was always an ache for what he should be able to smell and hear, the other hands and voices and heartbeats that had made up his home, but sometimes he’d get caught on a memory and look up to see Laura sneaking up on him or Josh turning back patiently, and it was something to almost smile at instead of salt in an open wound. Even when he’d walked the woods with his little pack of three it had been too raw, a punishment for himself as much as a responsibility. A territory this big was never meant to be a job for one person, and him not even an alpha, but he had his ghosts for company.

“Oh, fuck you, I gotta stop,” Stiles gasped as he collapsed halfway up the incline Derek had scaled on autopilot. Derek absolutely did not startle.

“Almost there,” he replied, a little guilty. They should probably circle around, actually. He jumped back down the steep slope landed on his feet in the loose scree next to where Stiles was panting on the ground.

“What, no flip?” Stiles taunted.

“I wouldn’t want to show off,” Derek said, flashing some teeth.

Stiles snorted. “That’s just unfair,” he said to his shoes.

Derek offered him a hand up, and he took it. He’d shed his outer shirt at some point and stuffed it in the bag, leaving him in a plain red tee that—with the way he usually dressed, you couldn’t see the shape of his shoulders, the wiry strength of his arms, so Derek was always unprepared for it. “Isn’t it lacrosse season? I feel like you should be better at this.”

That got Stiles moving, powered by indignation. “Hey, lay off, fragile human here,” he protested. “Besides, I’m built for speed, not stamina.” Derek’s eyebrow barely twitched. Stiles flushed a little and shoved him, but he was smiling. “Asshole.”

“C’mon, there’s a better way up this canyon,” Derek said. He picked his path more carefully this time and stayed aware of Stiles at his back, even though the slower pace meant he had some extra breath to complain with. It wasn’t too far; up the canyon ridge, where Stiles only slipped once, and through a dense knot of pines. Derek may have held some green branches aside to let them whip back at Stiles behind him, between casually ducking thrown pinecones without looking, until they broke out of the tree cover onto a grassy field that banked into a still pond, distant peaks rising behind it. Two roughhewn picnic tables were just around the curve of the shore, by an open-sided boathouse big enough for a few canoes.

“Hey, this is nice!” Stiles seemed surprised, as he swiveled in place to take in the site and the view. “I had no idea this was up here.” Derek watched him poke around and tried not to overlay bright memories over the weathered, lonely present.

“We’re pretty far from the trails,” he told Stiles. “It’s private property, you know.” He turned away to hide his smile and heard Stiles almost choke on a laugh. There was a sizeable boulder sitting in the open grass, and Derek pressed his hand to it before coming back to where Stiles had plopped on the ground and was rooting through his satchel. He wasn’t sure why Stiles hadn’t headed for the tables, but he didn’t mind. It was easier not to look at them.

“Okay. I’ve got… mountain ash, of course,” Stiles set a sturdy wide-mouthed plastic bottle on the ground next to him that was mostly full of dark powder, “and some stuff for testing.” Next on the grass was what looked like a sheet of tin flashing and a pane of plexiglass. A notebook was tossed out like an afterthought. Derek’s eyebrows inched up. “And sandwiches!” Stiles held two aloft triumphantly and grinned up at him.

“You’ve got a plan,” Derek observed.

“Of _course_ ,” Stiles said haughtily, waving a sandwich at Derek’s direction. “Turkey-bacon-avocado, on that bread with seeds and stuff.” Derek intercepted it and took a seat next to him, facing the lake. A little water bird was paddling around out on the lake, small, with black feathers.

He took a bite, after unwrapping and inspecting it. “This is good.”

“It’s a thank you sandwich,” Stiles said with his mouth full. “My dad got one with no bacon.”

“What are you thanking your dad for?”

“Not eating a hamburger,” Stiles said, joking and not-joking. “Also, we were talking about some of the cases in the kanima pile last night, and I might be groveling a little more for making him think I was a serial killer instead of telling him about werewolves.”

The little bird out there was lost, maybe, Derek thought; there used to be huge, noisy shoals of them, with calls echoing across the water. “It’s good that your dad knows. It’s better,” he told Stiles. Safer for everyone in the sheriff’s department, certainly, and his trust in Scott and Stiles was evidently enough to keep him from shooting the rest of them out of hand. Derek pointed at his own sandwich. “What if I had said no? Then this wouldn’t be a thank you sandwich.”

“A thanks-for-nothing sandwich,” Stiles snarked, “Or a consolation sandwich. For me.”

There was a distant splash, but he didn’t see any fish jumping when he looked up, just one set of quietly expanding ripples on the placid lake. The bird was gone, too, half a squawk barely echoing off the trees. Stiles reached into his bag and handed him a bottle of water just as Derek thought of the pallet in the shed. He drank, gave it back, and glanced over at the bag. “What else have you got in that thing?”

“First aid kit, lock picks, zip ties, Leatherman, little flashlight,” Stiles rattled off the list. It was like sometimes he waited until his mouth was full to talk.

“Perfect criminal starter kit.”

“It isn’t the tools that make you a criminal,” Stiles said with a smirk.

“Let me guess, is it using them to break the law?”

“Wrong again!” The smirk grew into a grin. “It’s getting _caught_. That’s why your criminal career was doomed, see, you got hauled in for things you don’t even do.”

“My dreams are dashed,” he said dryly. “You should add a lighter.”

“Oh! Yeah.” Stiles grabbed his notebook and opened it to the last page, dug around in the bag for a pen, and scribbled an addition to a list there, paused to chew on his pen, added another. “Whistle.”

“Put it on your keys.” Derek made a face. “Two. Make one a dog whistle.”

Stiles was delighted. “ _Really_.”

“Not another word,” he warned, and balled up his trash.

Stiles kept smiling as he stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and stood up.

They set up the first circle just on the grass. “The control,” Stiles declared. He took a small handful of powder, closed his eyes in concentration, and dropped it around himself, arm outstretched. The slight breeze that picked up when he started didn’t seem to disturb its fall. Stiles opened his eyes and found Derek watching him. “Okay, try it.”

Derek reached out to touch the back of his hand to the air above the wobbly line of ash. There was resistance, with a little bit of give, and a faint oily shimmer. “Feels like jello,” he decided.

“Fuck you, buddy! I do not make jello barriers. Try to get through it.”

He increased the pressure gradually. A slight humming became audible, like distant static, and harsh streaks of light shot from the iridescence around his hands, at the points of contact. The jello feeling stayed, but he couldn’t push any further. It hurt, too, like the jello was hot and caustic. His eyes flared blue and he backed off. “Hmm.”

Stiles watched avidly. “Is that all you got? Pull me out or something,” he challenged. Derek let a slow, predatory smile show his fangs drop. Stiles took a step back. “Uh, keeping in mind—” Derek lunged, Stiles flinched, the barrier flashed, and Derek was thrown back across the clearing, though he landed on his feet.

“That went over the line a few inches,” he noted. Stiles’s heart rate was still all over the place, so he grinned again. “It seemed to solidify when you were afraid.”

“I wasn’t afraid!”

Derek quirked an eyebrow.

“I may have had a perfectly healthy involuntary startle response.”

Derek gave him both eyebrows.

“Yeah, yeah, big bad wolf,” Stiles grumbled. As they were talking, Derek had nonchalantly wandered next to Stiles on the circle. His arm snapped out. He grabbed Stiles by the shirt, tossed him easily from the ring, and Stiles sprawled ungracefully on the grass.

“You lost your focus,” he admonished. Stiles rolled onto his back and put his hands over his face, groaning. His shirt may have ridden up a little bit, but Derek looked away.

They spent a while repeating their results so far with Stiles outside the circle, and they determined that even when the barrier was weak, Derek could wave an arm over the line but not step over it.  Stiles made notes. “It’s not science unless you write it down, right,” he said.

“It’s literally magic, Stiles.”

“Sure. Magic _science_.”

Stiles spilled another careful circle closer to the lake so that the line of ash lay across grass, sand, a flat rock, a sheet of notebook paper, and the metal and plastic squares Stiles had carried up in his bag. Derek walked around it, poking for weaknesses. As far as they could tell, the barrier was uniform no matter what it crossed, but that gave them the idea to try to find the top of the wall.

“I think it’s softer up here,” Derek said, probing the barrier as high as he could reach. He crouched and leaped in one smooth motion to get another couple meters, and his hand waved over the line almost freely. He landed and looked at Stiles reproachfully; his mouth had fallen open as he stared blankly from inside the circle. “Stiles.”

Stiles shook himself. “What? Yes. Okay. Um.” He remembered what they were doing. “Let’s try like, high, medium, low, see if there’s any difference. I’ll uh. I’m just gonna shut my eyes.”

Derek glanced to the sky and sighed. “Okay.” He tested at shoulder height first, jumped up, crouched down, checked the first spot again. “It’s stronger near the mountain ash.”

Stiles hummed. “That’s probably good, or werewolves on planes might like, smack into barriers on the ground,” he said.

Derek winced. “Wait. What if there were a circle on the plane?”

“Oh!” Stiles lit up. “Try to move it!”

Derek took the edge of the one-foot square of tin sheet, and carefully pulled it towards him, flat on the grass. They both watched in fascination as the line slid easily across the material to keep its place in the circle. Lifting the square met the same resistance as though he was trying to push through. He finally slid the tin all the way out from underneath the ash, only a few flecks of powder out of place as the line settled in the grass. Derek poked the barrier again; it held. They looked at each other. “Write that down,” Derek said.

Stiles grinned, dove for the notebook, and scribbled for a bit, only stopping to chew on his pen thoughtfully and look out into the trees. He squinted, looked down at his hands, back into the branches at the edge of the field. “Hey Derek,” he said, too calmly. “Do you see a bunch of birds over there?”

Derek was immediately on edge from his tone, so he shot a sharp glance at Stiles before following his line of sight. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “Crows. Looks like seven.”

Stiles released a controlled breath. “Crows. Totally normal? Not like—” Derek nodded. “Great. Okay. Cool.”

Derek watched them as they sat calmly, occasionally ruffling their feathers, until he dug some of their trash out of Stiles’s bag and lobbed the heel of his sandwich toward their tree. The crows blinked and cocked their heads at him, considered carefully, squawked at each other, and fluttered down to investigate the offering. Stiles made no move to get up again, instead staring at his notebook and his hands. “Hey,” Derek ventured, and touched his sleeve. “It’s been a good day, hasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Stiles said, sounding tired. “It was.”

Derek sat with him for a minute, then knocked their shoulders together. “C’mon. Let’s clean up. Isn’t your dad home soon?”

Stiles shook his head. “Nah, he’s got a double.” He stood, broke both ash lines with a sharp separation of his hands, considered his now half-empty bottle of mountain ash unhappily, and started carefully picking up powder and pouring it back in.  Derek went to help, holding the bottle while Stiles poured, but he flinched away at the inevitable spill, shaking out his fingers. “Wait, did that hurt?” Stiles asked, reaching to grab it.

Derek grimaced and held it out. The skin was already deep red, and as they watched, a blister formed, swelled, and popped messily. Stiles gagged. “Ugh, _so_ gross.”

“You asked to see it,” Derek grumbled, smoothing over the healing skin with his thumb. It stayed pink and shiny, nerves raw under the surface, and he got a little lost in the contrast between the sensitive new growth and the deadened tan skin around it. “I felt like I had sores in my mouth for a week, after Gerard,” he said without meaning to.

Stiles nudged the toes of their shoes together. “That might not have been the mountain ash. Maybe naturally toxic blood, because he was a festering cesspit of a person. Or like. If the shape you take reflects the person that you are, he was a sludge monster.”

Derek made a fist, flexed into claws, relaxed to blunt fingernails, and let his hand drop. “We should be more careful. Don’t spread it around the whole field.”

“I’ll bring a tarp or something to keep up here, next time,” Stiles said, head cocked to the side as he studied Derek’s face.

Derek nodded, looked away, couldn’t help the corner of his mouth turning up. Next time.

They took a different way back to the cars, longer, walking slow, and went for burgers after, since Stiles was hungry again when Derek asked, and neither of them had anywhere more important to be.

~~~

That night Derek was at home in bed, showered, comfortable, stretched out next to a book in front of a bank of dark windows, texting with Cora, when a message from Stiles came in.

 _After school Wednesday?_ Followed by a pine tree, pine tree, circle, pine tree, hamburger. Derek figured Stiles must have a busy week, if he was trying to plan ahead, for once, instead of just showing up when he was bored.

He didn’t let himself think about it too much; he sent back a thumbs-up emoji.


	2. Up the Mountain

Thursday morning Derek woke early, skipped his workout, and pulled on his boots, dark jeans, a faded long-sleeved Henley. The morning was cool, and he was headed up past the foothills, into the deep woods that coated the western side of the Sierras. He tossed some energy bars, water, and his phone into a backpack with a spare shirt and socks. His sunglasses were cold in his hand, colder when a metal leg of the frame brushed against his chest as he slid them into the v of his shirt on his way out the door.

“Those are hot,” Erica had said, the day after she took the bite, walking in the sunlight through the hospital garden, standing tall and flushed pink as the new flowers on the cherry trees, cautiously giddy with it, almost skipping. “Like, intimidatingly sexy. Like, nobody will talk to you because they can’t handle the fear boner, that kind of sexy.” Her eyes kept flicking to his sunglasses, over his face, and away, like she wanted to stare but wasn’t sure she was allowed. The day before, her hand had been shaking as she’d set it over his on her soft white hip, as she’d stopped him, met his red eyes to say to say, “What’s the catch? If you’re serious. If you’re not just—if you can really—That’s how these things go, right? It’s a trade. There’s a price.” She’d licked her chapped lips, shivered, skin jumping under his touch, heart beating so loud the blood sang to the power itching his teeth. In less than a month, she’d be bold enough to try to steal his sunglasses off his face, and he’d bat her hand away and scowl instead of smiling but she’d laugh, unafraid.

“That’s the idea,” he’d said dryly, joking and not-joking. Attraction was another kind of power, as he knew. As he’d been taught.

“Is it part of the package?” she’d asked, “Clear skin, muscles, superpowers—” a _cure_ , she couldn’t say, still choked on it with desperate hope “—leather jacket, sunglasses?”

He’d tipped his head forward to make steady eye contact with her over the rims. “It could be,” he’d said. “You’re a brand new you.” He’d winced a little, once his brain caught up and told him where exactly that was from, but nobody knew the stupid musical Laura’s friend had worked for—except Erica had opened her mouth and looked at him out of the corner of her eye and yep, she’d caught it, though she wasn’t quite brave enough yet to ask. But his rueful eyeroll was as much as an admission, and she’d blinked, faced him head-on, and met him with a slow, disbelieving smile.

“Alright,” she’d decided, “I want that. I want that a lot,” and they’d snuck out, gone to the mall, and it had felt like having a sister again; she may have started out more shy than any of the women in his family, but her angry determination he recognized, her furious drive to grab the world with both hands and shake it until it gave her what she wanted. The next day, they’d stopped at the high school just long enough for her to pick up her homework and sashay through the lunch room, and when she’d bounced back into the passenger seat, she’d been radiant.

His only stop on the way out of town was the coffee shop, where he got his usual and a few breakfast sandwiches to eat in the car. It wasn’t likely that Stiles would look for him two days in a row, especially since he’d started scheduling his visits, so he took a risk and set out for the far eastern border, where Hale land and the town preserve bled into the expanse of national forest that covered most of the mountains. He hadn’t been out so far since the Hunger Moon in February, the ground still cold and sleeping under his feet, and he’d only gone once the year before with Isaac, Erica, and Boyd. They’d left the Camaro by the paved road, run and run and howled with the wind, at the stars, echoing up the canyons. He’d been so glad to show them this, that he could give them this, to share the wild joy and feeling of belonging.

He kept the windows of the truck down as the town fell away and the forest closed in. Low fog hugged the road and crept between the trees, but he could breathe in air clearing of people smells and turning to wild lilac and cedar and pine. There was a park trail through the preserve that led to an old logging road that would give him a good starting point. There had been enough high snowpack last winter that the creeks wouldn’t be dry, yet, but they should be passable.

He parked when the path became too overgrown for the car, hung his permit on the rearview mirror though he’d never seen a ranger here, and set out on foot. The borders were weaker now than when he’d felt them as an alpha, vague impressions instead of a steady tug, but they still sang to him. He came to a touchstone and stood with it for a few minutes, resting his hand where so many before him had set theirs, feeling his connection with the life and earth, roots and foundations of his territory like a physical tether. The touchstones had probably been dropped by the glaciers and he had no idea how old his family’s traditions were, but his mother’s great-grandmother had been Konkow Maidu, and you could still find petroglyphs they left and places they sheltered in a thousand years ago, if you knew where to look in these woods. Maybe someone else would stand here and think about the past, a thousand years from now.

When he moved again, the sun had almost burned through the fog. Pale, black-bibbed chickadees and dark-eyed juncos called and sang, fighting as they flitted between trunks and limbs and bothered the squirrels. Derek stretched to wake up the muscles in his arms and back, breathed in the scents of damp green, secured his bag, and took off running. He dodged branches to race up a leaning tree, flipped over a blackberry thicket, leapt a rushing creek, startled a rabbit out of the brush and chased until he could reach out and touch the soft brown fur. He felt a fierce grin taking over his face, and when he didn’t want to hold it back any longer, he howled, long and loud, even knowing there would be no response.

~*~

He stopped a few hours later, on the top of a rocky bluff that loomed over the trees below. He could follow the dips of snowmelt canyons down toward Beacon Hills, almost hidden under oaks and bay, the neighboring towns sweeping out of the foothills like a river delta, and in the far distance, the Cubist green floodplain of the valley. After his third energy bar, he stood up and took a few pictures with his phone. In a moment of madness, he made one a selfie, smiling behind his aviators with the crumpled blanket of trees behind him. He sent it to Cora. She laughed at him but sent one back, hair back in a messy bun, school books spread out on a table, bright stucco walls behind her.

 _Don’t make me jealous_ , she sent. _I’m stuck in the valley till the next full moon_.

 _Ask Alejandro if you can borrow a truck this weekend_ , he replied, and she sent back a cactus and the peach that looked like a butt. She was on the Díaz pack’s resident mechanic’s shit list for a prank gone wrong a few years ago with guinea pigs and a bucket of honey, and Alejandro would never in this life allow her to borrow a truck. He smirked and stuck his phone in his pocket as he stood up to keep climbing.

~*~

The waxing sliver of moon wasn’t enough to keep him out after dark, so by the time it was up, he was back in the loft, comparing his memory and pictures on his phone to the lines of terrain on a giant map he’d printed a few weeks earlier at Kinko’s. The original was in the town records office, but now he had digital proofs and could run a new copy whenever he needed. It was big enough to drape over the sides of the long table, so he’d hung it on the heavy wood sliding door to the back rooms, next to the spiral staircase that went up to the roof deck. Careful dots of marker placed the touchstones, and a thick black outline enforced the legal Hale property limit. He filled in lakes and highlighted creeks with blue. He couldn’t decide how to mark the nemeton, so it got a black round sticker. So did the old house. He hatched out some patches to the east, verified by satellite pictures, where logging in the national forest had left regrowing fields. Next was the tricky part. A dotted red line went from between two logged patches, through a creek, across a corner of Hale land, and into the preserve. Whatever had left the track had been big, snapping thick branches easily eight feet off the ground, but he couldn’t find any kind of footprint, fur, or scent, just broken sticks, disturbed scree, and a coating of rocky dust over everything. The track had ended abruptly at a slumping pile and scatter of boulders, but that wasn’t even the strangest part: springy undergrowth had grown unaffected where he’d traced to the beginning of the trail, despite the scarred trees, and by the end the damage was a week old at most, leaves still wilting on severed branches. He had finally given up, baffled, leery, and resigned to digging through Peter’s old files.

His phone buzzed and he put down the marker, honestly relieved for an interruption. _So. What did you do today?_ It was Stiles. Derek wondered if he’d checked the GPS while he was out.

 _Vision quest_ , he sent back.

 _Fuck offfffff_ , then after a few seconds, _really?_

After a halfhearted deliberation, he sent the selfie.

_I am going to print out copies of this and hang them everywhere in town, you weirdo_

_Do it and I’ll never send another_ , he typed and immediately deleted. _They would never find your body._

_Scott would protect me_

_He doesn’t know these woods like I do,_ he sent _. Besides, didn’t you find a Christmas tamale behind his bed last week? That’s the keen tracking sense you want to trust?_

 _And a dead mouse, it was like mummified, SO GROSS_ and Derek knew the exact expression he would be making, that ridiculous combination of fascination and disgust. _So you might have a point, fine,_ Stiles continued. _Your moment of perfect happiness is safe with me._

Derek stared at his phone for far too long. _Do you know of any other rock creatures besides trolls?_ he finally sent.

 _Not off the top of my head. Why? Do we have trolls? DO WE HAVE TROLLS?_ There were an unreasonable number of line breaks.

 _Why does it seem like you’re excited for trolls?_ he sent, amused. _I’m not sure yet. It looks like a pile of rocks rolled itself three miles, partly uphill, over the course of a few months._ He sent a picture of the boulder field, too.

 _TROLLS ARE CLASSIC_ , he got back, and then: _Buffy never got to fight trolls. I feel like you’re trolling me with the rock thing, though_.

 _Anya’s ex_ , he pointed out.

_You didn’t even have to look that up, did you_

_There’s so little media with decent werewolf representation._

_Oh my goddddd_

Derek rubbed the pads of his fingers over the center of his chest. _The rock thing is real, as far as I can tell. No ideas besides troll?_

A series of texts followed quickly: _I’ll check the bestiary_ , and, _There’s rock elementals in World of Warcraft, if that counts._ A minute later, _It’s a pretty common belief that trolls turn to stone in sunlight like in LOTR, though I always figured that was more like statue-style._

 _Huh. Thanks._ He’d have to keep an eye on it. He had – he checked the map – at least a month before it got anywhere near a road or trail, if it kept moving at the same rate. The sunlight thing he could check now, though, and run a patrol by the pack’s houses after. He grabbed a jacket on the way out the door. Half an hour later he sent Stiles another picture: the same boulder field, in the dark, with bright lines left by fireflies over the course of a long exposure. _Still rocks_ , he sent with it.

 _Worth a shot_ , Stiles sent back. _Have they moved at all?_

 _No. They’re still_ , he replied, smiling to himself.

 _You are the LEAST funny_ , Stiles complained, after the ellipsis that indicated he was typing appeared and disappeared a few times.

He sent a smiley with sunglasses. Stiles sent him the poop face. 

Cora sent a picture with a rusty pickup with no hood behind her victorious grin, Boyd’s stoic smirk, and Alejandro caught smiling proudly at the back of Erica’s head as she picked dead grass out of her hair with fingers black from engine grease. He saved all the pictures in three secure places and cleared his phone for their safety.


	3. Roadkill Cafe

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Derek eats breakfast, misses Laura, gets a phone call, and goes for a drive.

Derek woke up with his arm already over his eyes against the sunlight, which was pouring in through the giant bank of windows that took up most of the high wall next to his bed. The way the light saturated the echoing, industrial space was one of the reasons he’d liked the loft; he hoped to be done with basements for the foreseeable future. The inescapable sun gave him a reason to get out of bed every day, kept him to a semblance of a schedule. He blinked up at the morning clouds, groggy, but rolled out of bed into a set of pushups. Pull-ups were next, on the bar hung between support beams by the kitchen. By the time he’d done a few sets of each, he’d managed to start a sweat, and he felt himself sink into the steady tug and stretch of muscles, fully inhabiting his body, its power and its limits, the exact space it displaced in the world. It had taken time to re-adjust, after losing the alpha power, and sometimes he still felt like he was weakening, but he’d never been so alone for so long. He didn’t know how much he would lose, without strong pack ties. He finished with some yoga routines on the roof deck. Yoga was something he and Cora had started together – competitively, because that was the only way to get Cora to do anything – and Erica and Boyd had joined, quieter, carefully, later, something for agility and flexibility to complement strength training while they were all healing from being trapped in the vault, and then after his—after the rest of the semester.

So, yoga was familiar. It helped. He found that he liked it, when he had the patience. He tried to have the patience. Laura had dragged him to Tai Chi with the old ladies in Prospect Park, a few times, but it hadn’t stuck, back then.

After a shower, he wandered silently back to the kitchen, opened the fridge. Stiles had come on Sunday, again, so it was Tuesday, and the little farmer’s market was tomorrow; he’d get more vegetables then. Today, the milk was still good, and the bread should be fine for French toast. He fried some bacon and mixed milk, eggs, vanilla, and cinnamon and cut up the end of the loaf, soaked the bread in batter, and tossed it in the same skillet when the bacon was done. While it finished, he pulled out a yogurt cup, blackberries, syrup. He ate at the long table, facing the sun, wondering if hummingbirds would find their way to a feeder on the balcony. Probably not. 

Finally he sighed, stood, rinsed his dishes, put them in the dishwasher. Washed the skillet. Washed the black stone countertops. Checked the fridge to see if he should get more blackberries: yes. Wiped down the stove. He found himself looking critically at the cement tile floor, and he growled, frustrated, fed up with himself. The barn door with the map on it separating the cavernous main space of the loft from the bedrooms creaked on its rails with a hard shove, and he skulked down the short hall to the larger of the two rooms, what had been Cora’s. They were both finished, painted, furnished, if sparsely. He’d tried to sleep there at first, but he’d been unsettled, out of sight of the doors and perimeter alarm, and without the sun in his eyes he’d stayed too long in the dark. The smaller room was still—if Isaac ever needed to come back, it was his. Derek avoided it.

The big room was half-full of the solid mountain of boxes packed and shipped by his landlord from his and Laura’s apartment in Brooklyn. He faced it with his chest tight. If he could open a box today, just open it, get it started, he could get groceries tomorrow and go to the lake and then there would be three days left to go through it this week. One box a week was a manageable goal. He could do this. He had to.

Every cardboard shell was packed with the minutia of the new life they’d carved out of nothing, and it all carried the ghost of the scent of their apartment: the deli downstairs in dill, caraway, sausage, and sourdough, car exhaust so pervasive he’d stopped noticing it, the odd dry cobwebby smell that followed Jó. The echo of tea and clove and art store solvents that hollowed him out with missing Laura. He didn’t know how to reconcile the pieces of that life, those lives, with this empty third attempt by himself. He needed normal shelves for their normal books, and something for pictures, and paintings, and every scrap she left behind had to be kept somewhere, kept safe. Her ugly placemats, woven for a textiles class, the white mug sets she made with handles like flowering vines, the afghan she knit to see if she liked knitting (“Most people might start with a scarf, Laura,” he’d said. “I could make one and make you eat it,” she’d offered sweetly). He had so little left of anyone else. He hadn’t understood why she wanted to go to art school, why she had such a drive to create, to give more to a world that would never appreciate it enough, would never hesitate to shatter it, but he was so darkly, desperately grateful now. There was a part of her left in each thing he could hold. If he could just. Open a box.

He was sitting on a wood and leather chair they’d grabbed off a curb in Manhattan and carried home across the bridge, staring at a cardboard seam closed with packing tape, one claw out, working up to being almost ready to break it open, when he got a call. He leapt to the door, ran out to the phone where he’d left it plugged in by the bed, picked it up, barely shaking. “Hey,” he said. It came out pretty even, he thought.

“Hey there, Derek, it’s Sheriff Stilinski.” Derek had the morbid thought that a murder might keep him busy for the rest of the day, and immediately wanted to punch himself.

“Sheriff. What can I do for you?”

There was a short pause. “Are you alright, son?”

Derek had to close his eyes. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, fine. What do you need?”

The Sheriff seemed to accept it. “Well, it may be nothing, but if you’ve got time, we’ve got some reports to investigate that could benefit from your expertise.”

“I’ve got time.” It was still new, this uneasy alliance between him and the Sheriff, but keeping Scott and Stiles out of active cases and in school as much as possible was a goal they could agree on, since the incident with the coyote girl.

“Okay. Come on down to the station and you can ride along with Parrish. He’ll catch you up.”

“I’ll be there in ten.”

He took the Camaro, after stepping back into the bedroom, slicing through the packing tape of the closest box marked “LH,” and fleeing the building. At the station, a squat municipal construction of pale brick, he found Parrish by the front desk, waved to the Sheriff, and turned around to load into a squad car. The new deputy was a living recruitment poster for the Boy Scouts: clean cut, smooth hair, earnest. He put Derek’s teeth on edge. Parrish handed him a cup of terrible station coffee and took a healthy swallow of his own before starting the car, and he waited for the one other vehicle on the street to pass before pulling out of the lot.

“Thanks,” said Derek, waving his hand still holding the coffee, debating whether he really needed to drink it to be polite. He took a sip, controlled his face carefully, and secured it in the cup holder. At least the acrid smell and taste cut through the worst of Parrish’s aftershave and the older smells of the cabin, fear sweat and boredom and firearms ground into the seats.

“Thanks for coming in so quick,” Parrish said amiably. “With any luck, we can wrap this up by lunch time.”

After too long a pause watching Main Street drift by and reflecting on the differences of being in the front seat, he realized Parrish was waiting for a response. “No problem,” he said, didn’t wince, barely.

Parrish glanced over at him after almost a laugh. “So, you’ve got an official job title now, right? What’d they go with?”

“Expert Consultant,” Derek admitted. The mayor had jumped on it, especially when told he’d do it for free; the mayor’s wrinkled secretary had stopped him on his way out to pat his hand and tell him his mother had been “such a pillar of the town, dearie, she would be glad you’re here to look out for us.” Derek had walked out of the building and started running and eventually stopped, exhausted, deep in the woods, to stare at the sky and wonder how many people in this Hellmouth of a town had always known that his family were werewolves.

“Expert in what, exactly?” Parrish asked. Derek blinked. Somehow it wasn’t a barb; the deputy seemed honestly curious. Just moved here, he reminded himself.

“Local wildlife, local history, whatever I can help with. You know how it is,” he tried.

“Wildlife, huh? They bring you in after all those mountain lion attacks? It would be nice to know why they’re such a problem around here.” He glanced at Derek again, still earnest, like he didn’t know that Derek’s relationship with the police had been different back then, when he was busy being hunted as a murder suspect.

“Well,” he said, “logging in the national forest has done a number on their habitat, which pressures them down toward the valleys, and the trails in the preserve go deeper than they should.” He was hedging, but both facts were true.  

Parrish gave a thoughtful hum. “How do you learn that kind of stuff, anyway? Park ranger school?” You couldn’t be a cop without at least a little natural suspicion. But how was he hiding it so well?

“Maybe, but not me,” he answered mildly. “I studied folklore in college.” More of his intermittent credits had been for history and languages, but it was an easy explanation for why he got pulled in on the weirder cases.

Parrish ticked a finger at him. “Thus the…” he trailed off.

“Yeah.” That seemed safe. He had no idea what Parrish was referring to. The wendigos, maybe.

“Right, right,” Parrish nodded, disconcertingly intent.

Derek decided his best hope was to answer a previous question to derail Parrish’s current train of thought, a tactic that usually worked on Stiles. “I was at a wildlife rehabilitation center for a while. Picked up a lot.” In Wyoming, that first summer running with Laura, numb shock just starting to collapse into a chasm of self-hatred and grief. A grizzled omega had let them stay for a while. Shelby. Derek hadn’t been much help, but sitting with hurt or angry animals, pulling their pain into his own, was something he could manage. “My family’s been here a long time, up next to the preserve. I grew up in the woods.”

Parrish smiled. “Raised by wolves, huh?”

Derek looked out the window, ached. “Something like that,” he said lightly. Squat houses next to the road gave way to the willows and long driveways of the lower canyon.

“And you came back, what was it, a year ago?” There it was.

“Last January. After my sister was murdered.” The Wolf Moon was a time to bring family together, he thought, bitter like bile.

Parrish coughed. “Ah. Sorry for your loss.” He glanced at Derek curiously. “But you stayed?”

Derek twitched a shoulder. “It’s home.” Can’t run forever.

Parrish nodded to himself, coughed. “Okay. Well, I guess I should get you up to speed on the case.” He grimaced a little. “The investigation. It’s nothing glamorous.” They rolled to a stop, pulled over in the dust on the side of a thickly wooded canyon road to the west of town, opposite the preserve, toward the valley. Out of his territory. Derek stayed deliberately relaxed; if this was some kind of ambush, Parrish was absurdly confident, which could be either very good or very bad. “Over the past couple weeks, a lot of roadkill has gone missing.”

Derek’s eyebrows shot up. “Someone filed a claim?”

Parrish chuckled and got out of the car. Derek followed. He immediately locked in on the smell of day-old blood and viscera, but watched the trees and walked with Parrish the fifty feet or so to a dark smear stretching to the middle of the road. “When we’re driving around and see it, or we get a call something got hit, we’ll pull it off to the side, call a maintenance crew to come haul it out. But the bodies have been gone before the crews show up.”

Derek nodded and looked around the quiet road. “Scene of the crime?” He stretched out his senses and started working to filter out the dominant scents: the kill, deer musk, bay laurel, car exhaust, hot tar.

“Yep, this was the last one.”

“Something big,” he observed. He stepped away from Parrish’s faint cloud of cologne and gunpowder, toward the trees.

“Mule deer,” Parrish confirmed.

Derek carefully scanned the dust, undisturbed brush, and low branches at the side of the road. “Coyotes wouldn’t drag out a deer whole. They’d dismember it.”

“Would a mountain lion?” Parrish asked.

“Sure. Or a bear.”  He gestured at the even undergrowth. “We’d see a trail, though, for either.”

Parrish was looking a little grim. “So you don’t think it was an animal.”

“I don’t,” he said. “If the deer was fresh enough, someone may have picked it up to butcher.” Parrish didn’t look convinced. “Were all the others deer?”

“There was a little one, last week. Otherwise it’s been a menagerie; raccoons, opossum, birds. A turtle.”

“This may be an outlier, then. How old is the site before this one?”  

Parrish checked his notes. “Sunday morning.”

Not too long ago, and it hadn’t rained. Derek started walking back to the patrol car, remembered he was trying to be sociable, stopped, turned back to Parrish. “Do you mind if we check it out?”

Parrish caught up and smiled, but it was a little dimmed. “Sure thing.” He was quiet when they got back in the car and flipped a U-turn on the quiet road.

Derek watched his jaw clench. “You were hoping it was an animal.”

“Serial killers often start small,” the deputy said. “Collection or mutilation of animals is cause for concern.”

“Ah.” In most small towns, that leap might have been a little paranoid. Must be nice.

The next site didn’t have any sign of scavenging, just coyote scat that was maybe a day old. They went to one more, on Derek’s side of the woods, old enough that the scents were almost gone. Derek almost asked to crack the windows on the way through town, but it was a long shot anyway, and the kind of thing Stiles would harp on mercilessly if he ever found out. Parrish did bring him back to the station before one, but his mood was subdued.

“Thanks for your help, Hale.”

He didn’t let himself hesitate. “Any time, Deputy,” he said, and held out his hand.

Parrish shook it and dug out a grin. “Just call me Parrish,” he said, “I’ll give you a ring if anything else comes up.” Derek nodded. Parrish went inside, and Derek went back to his car. He stood for a moment with his hand on the handle. Matt Daehler had been a student at Beacon Hills High School.

He sent a text. _If you hear anyone talking about a roadkill collection, stay away from them and tell your dad._

_??????_

_It’s not a case yet, just being careful._

_Nothing supernatural? Just a regular human serial killer?_

Derek shook his head. Of course Stiles would know. _No magic and no human bodies_ , he sent.

 _Yet._ It was hard to argue.

A door opened, inside, and Parrish’s voice carried out to the lot. “—prickly, sure, but a drug dealer? He helped with that cannibal cult, right, so the Sheriff seems to think he’s okay. I assume you’ve checked warrants—”

A footstep crunched near the car and he looked up. “Derek,” the Sheriff said. “Glad I caught you. Have time for lunch?”

Derek met his eyes and casually stuffed his phone back into his pocket. “Of course.”

They walked to the deli down the street and talked through the events of that morning. Presumably he’d gotten a quick summary from Parrish, but Derek could tell him everything. “Any shifters would have had to be hiding it. No sign of magic or monsters.” There were supernatural animals that would drag off or eat carrion, but he was sure he wouldn’t have missed the evidence. Druids wouldn’t usually have a particular scent if they weren’t casting, or if they did, they’d mask it, like Jennifer had. Not Jennifer. The darach.

“Alright,” the Sheriff said. “I guess we’re as sure as we can be.” He didn’t seem happy about it, but more confident, maybe. Human evil wouldn’t surprise him, at least. When he stepped up to order, the Sheriff got a sandwich and his eyes slid to Derek, assessing. “If I get cookies, will you rat me out?”

Unfortunately for the Sheriff, Derek’s loyalties were clear. “I hear the carrot raisin ones are good,” he said dutifully.

The cashier – Alex, the nametag said – piped up with, “Lorraine says Stiles says you’re allowed to have the carrot ones,” just in time for them to catch half the Sheriff’s betrayed scowl.

“I could arrest you both for conspiracy,” he grumbled, then sighed. “I’ll take two.” Alex hid a laugh behind their hand.

When the order was up, the Sheriff led him to a table outside, with some privacy, and Derek stood tall against the eyes that followed them out. The outside tables were basically reserved for cops to talk shop, set apart with blooming hedges in wood planters. Fat sparrows and a starling hopped after crumbs on the ground, and Derek tore off some crust to toss near the lone crow watching from a bench. Inside, someone was saying—he ignored it. His shoulders tensed. He didn’t let them hunch.

“So,” the Sheriff started, after a few bites. “What did you think of Parrish?”

Derek sat back. The Sheriff was carefully impassive.

“He seems alright,” Derek said cautiously. “Nice.” It wasn’t really a compliment or an indictment, just a fact. He was nice. It put Derek on edge because he didn’t know _why_ , but he recognized its value. 

“He served in Afghanistan.”

“I can see it.” He had that kind of confidence.

“Transferred just after Christmas,” the Sheriff went on conversationally. “Said he felt drawn here.”

Derek’s eyebrows went up. “Really.”

The Sheriff gave a small smile, but he squinted in a less exaggerated version of Stiles trying to solve a puzzle. “Didn’t seem to understand it himself.”

“Me neither,” Derek said honestly. Maybe he was like Lydia used to be, an unaware unknown.

The Sheriff nodded to himself, resigned to another mystery, for now. “I like him,” he admitted. “I hope he works out.”

“Is the station back up to full strength?”

“I’ve got as many as I can pay for,” the Sheriff said with a sigh. “I’d feel better with another two or three deputies, and I’m not too sure about some of the new guys. Stiles is going to help out with paperwork over the summer, at least.”

Derek nodded. “He’ll be happy to spend more time with you.” And poke his nose into every open case and some closed ones, he didn’t say, and quashed the start of a smile.

The Sheriff’s eyes narrowed, suddenly more incisive than Derek was comfortable with. “You two talk a lot, do you?”

Every instinct told him that was a trap, but he couldn’t _deny_ it. “Well, him more than me.” It was a weak dodge. “Asking questions and finding his own answers, you know how he is.” Derek carefully folded a corner of his napkin over and over in against itself, edges aligned, and smoothed out the wrinkles. He thought he might prefer to be tortured; then, at least, he’d know what to say. Stiles was a friend, he thought defensively. Friends talked. Friends had conversations about things, like human or supernatural threats threats to the safety of people they cared about. Friends had shared interests and pursuits, like eliminating those threats, and staying alive. A friend would probably commit murder to protect their friend’s family, even if the friend’s dad might shoot him for it afterward. Friends went to the diner with the bad pickles sometimes because the fries were better. Friends texted. He and Stiles texted.

The Sheriff snorted. “Hmm. That does sound like him,” he said, clearly unimpressed, but he let Derek live, for now. “Anything new going on in your part of town?”

Derek thought for a moment. No change in the creepy tree, as far as he could tell, but: “There’s an interesting trail down from the mountains that looks like a pile of boulders is hauling itself very slowly toward town,” he said.

The Sheriff looked like he wanted Derek to be making an incomprehensible joke. “Have you… seen that kind of thing before?”

“Never.” It was kind of nice to have other people being baffled along with him.

The Sheriff shook his head. “Well, I asked,” he said to himself. “Let me know if it gets close, I guess.”

“I’ll do that.” Derek hesitated while he thought about the map. “It might hit a trail in the preserve, first. I usually just block them off if they’re dangerous.”

“You usually—huh. Ha!” He stabbed a finger at Derek, accusing and triumphant, another familiar echo. “That bothered me for years! The rangers used to complain _constantly_ , and we thought it was the weirdest kind of vandalism. Official signs and everything. Jesus. Local werewolves protecting the town, nobody had that in the betting pool.” He shook his head, sobering quickly. “Not many mountain lion attacks back then, though.”

Derek looked at the table. “No.”

They cleaned up their trash when they were done, and the Sheriff clapped him on the shoulder. Derek didn’t flinch. They parted ways at the station, and Derek looked at his car, debating between the boxes and the woods. In the end, he walked to the secondhand bookstore, found something in the back, and went to the park near the middle of town. There was a boulder there, one he knew, surrounded by grass, and he leaned against it and read.


	4. Interlude: A Week in the Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I wanted to post this as a separate chapter, but it is too tiny to wait a week! THANK YOU everyone who has commented so far, you are amazing :D

Stiles came to the house more often in the next few weeks, excited to have a project, Derek guessed, or bored. He worked on making stronger barriers and using as little ash as possible, willing it into closed lines, throwing it up in the air and having it drop in a circle like they’d seen—like other people could. Derek finally picked him up and dunked him in the lake to get the resulting cloud of mountain ash out of his clothes and hair, and they stayed in for a while, shoving each other and splashing around where it was warm and shallow enough that they could both keep their feet on the rocky ground, until Stiles yelped and leapt out because he'd felt a little pondweed or a fish touch his ankle. They found out while trying to move a tiny circle of ash fully contained on the pane of plexiglass that not only could Stiles carry the whole thing around, but the barrier went below as well as above the clear plastic. Making too many circles seemed to tire him out; he slept for a few hours Saturday afternoon, curled up in the long green grass by the lake, with no nightmares, for once. If Derek sat nearby with his shadow blocking Stiles from getting sunburned on his face, at least he wouldn’t have to listen to Stiles complain about it later, and it was nice there, anyway, watching the woods and rippling water. One evening, Derek was running a patrol around the edge of town and found Stiles in lacrosse shorts and a soaked white t-shirt with his feet slapping the pavement like he was trying to outrun his own mind, and Derek fell into step beside him for one mile, two, and showed him how to run quieter, swatted his elbows until he held them in correctly.

The Sheriff called Derek to the station again to look over some more cold cases he suspected might have supernatural elements; some of them probably did, some certainly, but even violent crimes on full moons were most often mundane. Some graffiti under a bridge was very shoddy glyph work, which he brought to Deaton for lack of any other nebulously-magical quasi-authority. A tree had been reported stolen by Lydia’s parents, off their patio, which stuck out until he connected it with the dryad grove that had one midsize pear tree sitting in the broken crown of a pot. It probably wasn’t worth worrying about. You don’t fuck with dryads. He marked it on the map. There was a small stack of reports, previously filed as pranks, that a statue in the park by the Dairy Queen had moved, somehow, or changed. With the trail to a pile of rocks scarring the woods, Derek wasn’t going to call it impossible. At least the boulders themselves seemed to have settled in their clearing.

A black bear with two cubs rambled through the preserve, kept to itself, and moved on. Another nest of the fast-moving, woody, possibly carnivorous vines he’d never seen before this year had to be hacked back from one of the public trails. A small troupe of redcaps with long, wiry arms, yellowed talons, and necklaces of tiny bones took up residence in one of the fire watch stations. Derek took a while to heal from that unwelcome discovery, lying on the ground and staring up at the sky, blood seeping into the dirt and dirt caking onto his skin, but he made sure the grave was deep, transplanted a mountain hemlock into the fresh-turned soil, and left a branch of yew. At the farmer’s market, the owner of the stand with the cinnamon-sugar almonds that Boyd had gotten him addicted to tried to set him up with her daughter. It was hard to say if he or Desiree was more embarrassed, until she said she’d gone to Davenport Prep and remembered Josh from Math League. They went for coffee, and she talked a lot, said he was a good listener, and showed him pictures of her three-year-old on her phone, so that could have been worse, too.


	5. Stiles Naps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some brief first appearances by familiar faces! Stiles sleeps for a while. It's... mostly fine. Probably. Right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> spoilery warnings at the end of the chapter!

Derek eventually got through another box, folding fabric to store in the bottom of one dresser and otherwise leaving sorted piles on the bed, for lack of any better ideas, except for her chipped NYU mug stained inside with paint, which he carefully put away behind the other mismatched mugs. After sitting on a stool and not looking at it for ten minutes, he moved it to above the fridge. When he got back from a patrol, he moved it to the back of an empty top shelf.

The day after, it was back in the bedroom with the rest of the boxes, and he’d resigned himself to not really moving from the couch for a while when he heard a scuff and soft footfalls echo up the stairs. A familiar heartbeat gradually ascending to the outside hall. When Stiles eventually slid open the door to the loft, Derek was standing on the other side with his arms crossed. He wasn’t sure how Stiles had a key, but he didn’t mind; if he hadn’t made his own, he would have given him one by now, probably. For emergencies.

“Hey,” Stiles greeted tiredly. There were angry dark circles under his eyes, and everything about him was muted in a way that made Derek want to be careful.

“Hey,” he said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

“Yes,” Stiles said, drawing it out, accompanied with slightly disjointed finger guns. “I am. That is correct. Ten points to…” he squinted at Derek, “Hufflepuff,” he despaired.

“Stiles," he prompted.

“I couldn’t do it. I don’t want to be around people.” He dumped his backpack to the ground and slumped against the wall from the top step.

“Ah, I see, I don’t count as people,” Derek said lightly. If he really wanted to be alone, he would have just stayed home. Instead, Stiles was here, staring like he was fascinated by Derek’s bare toes. Derek flexed them self-consciously, and Stiles twitched like he was startled by the motion.

“You know what I mean.” Stiles leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “I’m just fucking tired,” he admitted, like pulling off a scab. “Haven’t been sleeping.”

Derek noted the way he was slipping sideways down the wall and braced a hand on his arm before he fell over. Stiles leaned into it precariously. Derek sighed. “You want the couch or the bed,” he asked. The couch meant a Stiles awake enough to watch Netflix, or not sleeping for long; the bed was more comfortable.

Stiles looked up at him, searching his face. “What even are your eyes,” he said finally.

“Okay. You’re going to bed.” He held out an arm for Stiles to hold on to.

“I can _walk_ ,” he said defensively, and promptly tripped on the bottom step down from the door.

Derek caught him by the back of the shirt and put Stiles’s arm around his shoulders, tugged him close with a hand on his waist. “I don’t even want to think about how you got over here,” he said. He hadn’t heard the Jeep, but he hadn’t been listening for it.

“I was doing okay until I got to your stupid infinite stairs,” Stiles mumbled. Derek concentrated on getting him across the room. It was late enough that the sun wouldn’t be directly on the bed, at least, though Stiles seemed tired enough that it wouldn’t matter. “There’s more construction stuff down there. Did the permits come through?”

“Yeah. Commercial approved for the first floor, studios and apartments for the rest of it.”

“Classy.”

“—So the new elevator will be done soon, and I’ll be around all day,” he tacked on, like it was related, and Stiles slumped against him harder with an undisguised sigh of relief.

They made it to the bed, where Derek set him down, pushed him over till he was flat, pulled up his legs, and tugged on his shoes until his feet fell out. Stiles giggled like he’d been awake since the last time Derek had seen him, two days ago. Derek considered for a moment. He picked up the edge of the comforter and used it to roll Stiles over to the other side of the bed, further from the door, and flipped it over him so he could make his blanket burrito. Stiles grumbled a little but went with it, rubbed his nose back and forth on the pillow, pulled the comforter tight, and went still. Still as he ever got, anyway. Derek stepped away silently to get his laptop and tea from next to the couch. By the time he sank carefully onto the empty side of the sheets, Stiles was already asleep, twitching and mumbling nonsensically almost as soon as he was under.

An hour or so later, Derek’s phone buzzed with a text from Scott. _Do u no whr Stles is?_

_I’ve got him_ , Derek sent back. _He’s asleep_.

_OK_ , Scott replied _._  Derek thought that might be it, but a few minutes later he got another one. _Watch for nightmares_. He couldn’t even be properly annoyed that suddenly Scott could type out whole words, and he managed to delete his instinctive _Obviously_ before he sent it. Stiles had started to breathe too fast with tense, jerky movements a few times already, but he quieted okay with a hand on his shoulder and a little pull on his hurt with dark veins.

Derek tapped his phone against his hand a few times, took a breath, and sent a text to Stiles’s father. _Stiles is with me at the loft. He’s asleep. He can stay as long as he needs to._

Three dots appeared and disappeared. Twice. _Alright_ , the Sheriff finally sent _. Thank you for telling me. Call me if I need to be there._ Derek stared at his phone a long time after the screen went dark, not sure what he’d done to earn that kind of trust.

Thirteen hours after Stiles had passed out, Derek found himself frowning down at him. He was sprawled on his back, limbs splayed haphazardly, mouth almost closed. His heart was fine, breathing regular, but something was off. “Stiles,” he tried, got a twitch that may or may not have been a reaction. Derek closed the laptop and put it on the floor, tucked it under the bed. “Stiles,” he said again, louder, shaking him a little with a hand in the center of his chest. He tried to pull any pain, but there was something that felt like a wall, or like opening a door against negative pressure. “Stiles, it’s a dream. You’re okay. Everyone’s okay.” No change. He was starting to get worried. Without warning, without change in his breathing or heartbeat, startling amber eyes opened, almost wolf-gold, and began to track systematically through their field of vision. Their gaze locked on Derek, unhurried, roving around his face, evaluating, cold.

Derek felt his hackles rise, a creeping, shivering feeling. “No,” he said. He didn’t know why. The smallest tightening of muscle at the corner of Stiles’s mouth pulled the cold blankness into the barest hint of a smirk. Derek clenched his hand in the fabric of Stiles’s shirt. He braced himself and shouted. “Stiles!” One more minute change around his eyes, and there was a sense of disparaging amusement, like someone had stupidly fallen for a cruel joke. Derek knew Stiles, had no illusions as to his character, knew that was an expression that he could make, had made, had _meant_ , but it felt wrong. Everything about this was wrong. He felt a snarl tearing up from his chest, when one of Stiles’s long, elegant fingers pressed flat against his lips and bared teeth. Callused, scarred, delicate skin dragged against the sensitive inside of his lower lip and the bristle of his beard, and Derek wanted to run, wanted to bite, wanted to smile against it and lean in, wanted to howl, panicked, for help. The sense of hostile mirth intensified as Stiles’s lips moved, softly pursed, as if to form a word, but no sound came out. Slowly, mechanically, dark lashes closed over familiar eyes made alien. They shot open the next instant, and Stiles’s heartbeat took off like he’d been running, he gasped deep breaths like he’d been drowning, his hands fell to clench white-knuckled in the covers. Derek was frozen, statue-still. Paralyzed.

Stiles recovered quickly, picked his head up, took in Derek’s hand still resting on his chest, his blue eyes, his wary stillness. He dropped back to the pillow, looked at the ceiling, embarrassed. “Screaming?” he asked, almost clinically.

“Staring.” It seemed inadequate. “And you… shushed me.”

“Taste of your own medicine,” Stiles joked weakly. Neither of them moved. “I’ve been sleepwalking, a little bit. I used to, after—when I was younger. Sleep staring isn’t so bad.”

“It was,” it was a lot of things. “Unsettling.”

“Ha,” Stiles said. “Yeah. I bet.”

They sat for a few more moments. “We’re okay,” Derek said, for both of them.

Stiles snorted derisively. “Are we ever.” 

“We’re alive,” Derek responded, automatic; he heard Laura’s voice as a distant echo to his own, and had to look away. “You should shower. There’s pizza if you want it, or cereal.” Stiles made a grumpy sound, but rolled over, sat up, and shuffled off to the kitchen with half his hair flat. Derek watched him go, tidied the bed, tossed the comforter in the dryer by the elevator to bake out the harsh sting of fear.

Stiles was standing at the edge of the kitchen, slurping milk out of his Batman mug, when Derek came over to stand beside him. “Is that new?” Stiles asked, gesturing to the middle of the floor. There was a giant triskele, stained dark, twelve feet across, cut flush with the staggered oak-pale planks that ran through the rest of the space.

“New with the floor,” Derek said. So, three months, give or take, during which time Stiles had been here and awake—a few times, anyway, though not as often as the previous summer, between his sophomore and junior years. Isaac and Lydia still came to the loft once in a while, when they needed something, but it wasn’t like he’d hoped, once upon a time, standing in the big, open kitchen before he bought it. It wasn’t a real pack space any more, where his betas would be because they wanted to be there, where they would feel like they belonged and eat all his food without him. But Stiles still showed up with homework and curled up on the couch, still paged through Derek’s books and watched Netflix. Derek and Cora and Erica and Boyd had left in October, and one of the twins had broken open the loft to host a black light rave on Halloween with Boyd’s blood still staining the floorboards. Reconstruction had helped Derek reclaim the space as his own. With a few more months of distance, he could admit that he may have been a bit literal. “I can see how you kept missing it. It’s subtle.” It was huge and high-contrast and in no way subtle.

Stiles snorted. "I think it’s actually so big I couldn't see it right, like an ant crawling across a billboard can’t read the words. If ants could read," he said. “Very, you know, in-theme for you, though. Hashtag branding." 

“Hashtag no vocalized hashtags, _please_ ,” Derek said, sounding pained, even as he felt his shoulders marginally loosen.

“It makes you hashtag laugh, though.”

Derek huffed as though he could deny it. “That’s a hashtag self-defense mechanism,” he insisted.

“Hashtag same,” Stiles said seriously, and their eyes met for a second, another conversation entirely, that ended in a twitch of his shoulder and a head-tilt. Stiles put down his mug. “I could do a hand sign, instead,” he went on, and made two peace signs, crossed.

“Nope, that’s worse.”

“Hashtag unreasonable,” Stiles complained.

Derek tried to squash a smile. “My hashtag house, my hashtag rules.” He gave in and grinned, slow and sure. “Buddy.”

That got a laugh, short and sharp. “Hashtag memories,” Stiles said fondly. Derek scoffed. “Don’t even front with me, you knew we had something special.”

“An intractable destiny to annoy each other into the next life,” Derek said.

“Aw,” Stiles teased, “that’s almost romantic.”  

Derek looked at him with a soft smile and waited for him to squint back a little, confused. Stiles habitually slouched so much, every time Derek realized they were almost the same height, he found himself surprised. He slowly raised a hand to run a thumb gently across Stiles’s cheekbone, splayed out his fingers along the curve of his jaw, and gradually increased the pressure and pivoted until he was shoving Stiles toward the bathroom by his face.

“Hashtag rude!” Stiles griped, but he went. Derek watched him go, scratched his fingers through his stubble, hated himself a little, made coffee.

“Thanks,” Stiles said later, eating cold pizza after finishing the fruit loops.

“It’s nothing,” Derek said, trying to convince himself. “I had nothing better to do,” he added, which would have been true regardless.

Stiles was wide awake after sleeping all day, so he dragged Derek downstairs, bullied Lydia out of her house to sit shotgun in the Jeep, and had Derek take them to see the scattered pile of rocks that might be a monster. They looked like rocks, and felt like rocks, and had responded like rocks to his claws and Stiles hitting one with a tire iron, but Lydia stood in the moonlit field in ballet flats and said the boulders sounded like growing, like trees did but quieter, whatever that meant. “Don’t ask me to describe it any better, Stiles, sap flow through xylem is driven by transpiration and _capillarity_ , so I shouldn’t be able to hear it at _all_ , let alone in a rock.” At his blank look, she’d snapped, “It’s laminar! Non-turbulent!” and then Stiles, at least, understood. He turned to Derek to explain. 

“Water is silent when it's flowing smooth, right? You only hear it when it ripples or drips.” His hands cut graceful rivers through the air. Derek looked away, cleared his throat. 

“Heartbeats,” he said. 

“There’s turbulent blood flow every time a heart contracts,” Lydia dismissed. 

“No—you can’t hear heartbeats.”

“No, I—oh. Not usually, no.”

Derek shrugged. “So it’s magic.”

“I don’t know why you would think that would make me feel better,” she complained, but her rigid posture relaxed and she leaned into Stiles for warmth. 

The consensus was that they were probably something like alive, but peaceful, at least for now. Lydia liked them. Derek wasn’t sure if that was a good sign or not.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: Stiles seems to be briefly not himself! Seen from Derek's POV and Derek is alarmed.
> 
> The Batman mug idea is borrowed shamelessly from andavs; I think I first saw it in [Tabula Rasa](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1600697), a great Stiles-is-forgotten fic written way before s6.


	6. Isaac

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Back to the woods! A few weird plants, a bunch of drama.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> specific warnings in the end notes

They had been building toward something almost like a routine, when he heard the Jeep a day before he was expecting it. Derek was too far from the house, scowling hard at one of the new trails that the park service had built in the last few years. When he finally caught the distant echo, he glared up at the canopy and swore. Even running shifted, he didn’t make it back until the Jeep’s engine had finished ticking down to cool where it was parked next to his Toyota. Derek was so annoyed as he pulled his bloody shirt back on and strode through the house that he didn’t notice Stiles was sniping with another person who was muttering back pressed close beside him and not on the phone until two faces turned and looked up at him from the steps, one with wide blue eyes in a pale, aristocratic face under a mess of blonde curls. Derek stopped abruptly just outside the door.

“Isaac.”

“And Stiles!” with sarcastic jazz hands. “What happened to your shirt?”

Derek looked down, like he’d forgotten about the long slice up the side, bloody at the edges. “Vines,” he said shortly, and Stiles opened his mouth but by some miracle managed to restrain himself from commenting, shutting it with a click of teeth.

“Scott had to work,” Isaac said uncomfortably, as though that answered any of Derek’s unvoiced questions.

“They’re fighting,” Stiles said, which did. “I thought nothing could annoy me more than Isaac’s normal face, but no, his mopey face is even worse, and Scott’s moping too.”

“We’re not fighting,” Isaac mumbled. They obviously were.

“I don’t care,” Derek said. He crossed his arms. “What do you need?” Stiles didn’t have his satchel out.

Stiles and Isaac shared a glance, and Stiles waggled his eyebrows to be obnoxious; Isaac huffed at him. “Stiles said you’ve been… hiking,” he said cautiously. Derek’s heart jumped, and he cursed himself. By Isaac’s sharp look, he had heard it. “I could go with you. If that’s okay.” He looked at his feet, poked at a stain on his boot, probably old blood. “It’s nice out.” Derek took a breath, let it out slowly. Isaac was asking.

It was nice out, clear and cool after a little bit of rain the day before. Derek quirked an eyebrow toward Stiles, who twitched a shoulder. “Somewhere new?” he asked out loud.

“Sure,” said Stiles, “Just don’t run straight up a cliff and leave me to die.”

Derek huffed. “It was not that steep.”

Stiles looked at Isaac. “Notice the complete lack of denial about leaving me to die.”

“Don’t worry,” Isaac assured him, “If it happens again, I’ll hold Scott’s hand at your funeral.”

“No, gross, you’re so not invited,” Stiles said, shoving at his shoulder.

They looked up when Derek cleared his throat. “Do you remember the northern border trail?” he asked.

Isaac winced. “A little bit?”

 “An hour to the lower lookout? Hour and a half?” Derek hazarded. He’d gotten used to walking at Stiles’s speed, which had been gradually improving, but he wasn’t confident about extrapolating hiking time. Isaac just shrugged, so he didn’t know but had nowhere to be. Stiles was looking between them keenly.

“Should I bring the bag?”

“Probably,” Derek said. “I can carry it, if you want.” Stiles stood up straight and started smiling. Derek studied the underside of the porch roof. Isaac did not realize it was a set up.

“What bag?”

“Witch bag!” Stiles could barely let him say it before jumping in, hands flying. Isaac assumed his grammar was being corrected in, to be fair, a pretty typical fashion, and rolled his eyes.

“Okay, which bag?” He was already annoyed. That would just make it worse.

Derek walked back into the house, partly to go get water and partly to escape. By the time he joined them on the porch again, Isaac was simultaneously infuriated, laughing, and something like relieved. That seemed about right. “You’re not _actually_ a witch, though,” he was saying to Stiles.

“Well…” Stiles equivocated, with a side-to-side motion of his hand.

“No,” Derek said. He moved to take the canvas messenger bag of mountain ash and emergency supplies, then paused. “Chalk or charcoal,” he said. They both gave him confused eyebrows, Stiles’s jumping and Isaac’s furrowing. “For marking.” Stiles nodded, dug the notebook out, wrote it down.

Derek ducked into the strap, adjusted it a little bit, and hesitated. He walked out to the edge of the yard, the two teens trailing like ducklings. He stood and searched the woods, glanced back at them. He reached up to rub a hand through his stubble. Stiles opened his mouth, but Derek spoke first. “It’s been pretty quiet,” he started; Stiles punched him in the arm for saying it out loud, and he twitched a hand dismissively. “ _But_ ,” he continued, “I haven’t been able to cover the whole preserve. So, you should know. It’s been feeling strange.” He could be careful about around the house and up to the lake, but this trail went further out.

Neither of them looked surprised. “The town feels that way, too,” Isaac noted. Stiles scanned the trees off to the side, avoiding them. “It’s been that way since,” his eyes shifted toward Stiles, confirming what Derek had suspected. He’d left right after the last sacrifice to the Nemeton, and the creeping feeling of something different had been a constant since he’d come back. Animal populations would be low for a few years, recovering, but the eerie, expectant stillness was more than that.

“Okay,” he sighed. “It’s probably fine. Run if I say run.” They both scoffed, though not so much at the idea there might be anything dangerous as at the chance they’d have to be _told_ to run. Derek pointed at Stiles and attempted some levity. “Don’t trip. Isaac might try to carry you, and I’d have to leave you both for dead.” He earned a smirk from Isaac and an annoyed scrunched expression from Stiles and counted it a win. Something might have rustled the leaves under some low branches as they set out, but there was no heartbeat, so maybe not.

This was an important path, not marked but clear. It bordered the Beacon Hills Preserve and was dotted with touchstones. They passed the first soon after the house, and Derek brushed a few fingers on it in passing, softly, almost reverently. Isaac hesitated for a second, but did the same. Stiles was watching a creek on the opposite side of the trail.

The touchstones may have had a better name, but that’s how he knew them. They were stones you were supposed to touch. Whenever his family walked or ran in the woods, if you crossed a touchstone and the scent was old, you touched it, and there were a few scarred trees with the same rule. The stones were scattered around Hale property and well into the preserve, but there were others up in the mountains of the national forest, and three in town, that he knew of. Part territory markings, part pack bonding game, part superstitious tradition. They didn’t smell like anyone but him, any more, and there was a difficult-to-define ache in his chest at Isaac’s offer. Even if Derek never joined Scott’s pack, Isaac would always have a claim on him and the territory, from the bite. If Isaac wanted it, after Derek had fucked up so much.

The creek through this valley brought enough water to support more flowering plants and trees than the flatter planes of lowland woods, and it was far enough down from its source in the mountains that downed trees and the stripping force of snowmelt floods didn’t threaten the banks. Leggy rhododendrons in the shade by the water were almost finished for the year, but pink-pointed dogwood flowers still coated their trees like snow. The ground was grass and reeds and hiding curls of fern under berry plants still just starting to bud. When Derek had met him, Isaac had already known a lot about ornamental plants from landscaping the cemetery, and he’d kept an interest in learning about wild ones. Stiles had been badgering him to name everything in sight, after finding an eldritch horror of a fungus by the water that neither of the wolves could identify. He abruptly stopped and pointed at a low cluster of leaves and buds. “Wait, isn’t that wolfsbane? The cone stack of flowers. Is all of that wolfsbane?” Isaac shook his head; he could smell the difference, even from a few feet away.

“Lupine,” he and Derek said together.

Stiles barked a laugh. “Was that a werewolf joke? It wasn’t even a joke. But you both said it.” He peered between them. “Have you been infected by that alien tentacle plant and it’s slowly commandeering your nervous systems? If yes, blink twice.”

“Why are you like this,” Isaac asked with morbid curiosity.

“If our nervous systems were commandeered, we wouldn’t be able to control our blinking,” Derek said, which Stiles conceded ungracefully with a face. “The plant is called lupine,”

“Why—”

“I’ve heard that growing in places with bad soil meant people thought it was stealing nutrients from the ground, like a wolf would steal livestock,” Derek said. “But it might be because some kinds can help us heal.”

“It doesn’t steal, though, it’s the opposite,” Isaac said. “It’s in the pea family, so it fixes nitrogen and acts as a fertilizer.”

“Oh! _Lupinus_ , in your plant book,” Stiles said, “Except the picture—”

“—Is a bluebonnet, but those are only in Texas. Same genus.”

“Ugh,” Stiles said. “Okay, whatever, I guess the book is like a hundred years old, they didn’t have Wikipedia yet. It’s not like a minor oversight that could mean the difference between life and death, or anything.” The sarcasm was palpable. Derek sighed. There was a reason that book had been tossed in the vault; the newer edition had burned with the rest of the house. It would be the work of a lifetime to find everything that was even possible to replace from that room alone. A lifetime longer than Derek’s. “So, one heals and one kills you, how can you tell the difference?” Isaac opened his mouth and held up a finger. “Without smelling it.” Isaac closed his mouth and rolled his eyes.

“The flowers are different shapes when they bloom. Wolfsbane is more like a bell, or a hood,” Derek said.

“Monkshood,” Stiles connected, “like a,” he put his hands together as if to pray, “monk’s hood.”

“Exactly.” Derek crouched and used a claw to cut a stalk of leaves, then turned and searched the steep side of the valley. “They can grow in the same kinds of clusters and in the same areas, but if you know what to look for, you can tell which is which.” He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. Green and flowers and rich earth were heavy scents here, a few mammals, birds, rotting pitcher plants and the creepy tentacle fungus by the water, a snake nearby. A hint of strange tar. Not too far away, he found what he was looking for. He gestured for them to follow, and took them up a slope. “This one’s sprouting wolfsbane,” he pointed. Stiles squinted at it. Derek held out the lupine and gave him and Isaac a chance to compare.

“The leaves are different,” Stiles said at last. He pointed at the lupine first. “These are oval in bunches.” He carefully didn’t touch the wolfsbane. “Those are fingery.”

“Yep,” Derek said. “It’ll also grow to be taller.”

“Good to know,” said Stiles. “With our lives, that will probably be important at some point.”

Derek sighed. “Probably.” He dropped the lupine leaf and went back to the trail. “The deadliest part is the root,” he said. “Dried leaves and petals will kill us, so that’s what the hunters use most often, but even breaking off stalks is dangerous for humans. You have to be very careful with the sap and root.” He searched his memory for anything else Stiles should know and Isaac should remember. “I’ve only seen purple and blue wolfsbane grow naturally around here, but some types have a yellow flower, or white or pink.”

“How many kinds are there?” Stiles asked.

“Hundreds,” he said darkly. “Some hunters specialize in cultivating specific side effects.”

They walked in silence for a bit and everyone tried not to dwell on what kind of experiments would be necessary for that kind of scientific testing process. Derek automatically reached out to touch the trunk of a gnarled tree, and Isaac echoed.

“Do you know why it’s so powerful against werewolves? It’s not just extra sensitivity to the aconite, with the other stuff,” Stiles asked.

“No,” said Derek, but then…. He glanced at Stiles, though Stiles didn’t look back. “Well. Maybe the weight of thousands of years of belief.”

Stiles hummed. “Magic either way.” Derek shrugged one shoulder.

The trail turned steeper as it edged out of the valley cut by the creek, and Stiles didn’t have any breath to talk. Derek took pity on him eventually and stopped by a little series of waterfalls burbling under tall pines. Their footsteps were muted in the carpet of needles. A large touchstone sat in the center of a near-perfect circle of trees, and Derek brushed it as he went to sit by the water. Stiles made an elaborate show of collapsing in exhaustion. Derek looked up at the canopy. He dug out a bottle of water and tossed it at Stiles, smacking him dead center in the stomach. Derek ducked his head to hide a smirk and Isaac stifled a laugh. “You are both the worst,” Stiles declared, rubbing the sore spot and glaring.

“Aw,” Isaac said, mocking, and tapped his chest to show he’d heard the lie. Derek let himself smile a little bit.

Stiles groaned loudly. “The worst,” he repeated, drawing it out for effect. He drank his water and breathed deep, stretched out on the ground.

Isaac had set himself against a burl of roots with one knee pulled up toward his chest. Derek watched for a minute, out of the corner of his eye. as he snapped pine needles into tiny pieces by poking them against the ground. Derek stretched out his senses, but the woods were calm; a thrush sang, a grouse warbled through the underbrush, squirrels and wind in the high branches, a woodpecker maybe a mile away. Might as well get to it.

“So. Isaac.” He glanced up briefly, but wouldn’t make Isaac look at him while he talked. “Why are you fighting with Scott?”

“I’m not!” was the immediate, indignant response. Derek waited. Stiles looked on unsympathetically. A muscle ticked in Isaac’s jaw. “It’s stupid.” He jabbed a bundle of pine needles viciously into the dirt. Derek and Stiles shared a look. Isaac scowled and brought up his other knee defensively. “It’s probably my fault for being a dick about it.”

Stiles gave a long sigh. “While that’s very self-aware of you, Scott knows you well enough to never expect you not to be a dick about anything,” he said.

“I guess that’s how he stays friends with you,” Isaac shot back.

“Yeah, you’re welcome, I got him trained,” Stiles said, with only the faintest trace of bitterness. “But his bullshit is still my bullshit, so I’m going to help. He’s doing that thing where he’s mad at you but won’t admit it because he thinks he shouldn’t be.”

Isaac glared at his knees. “I thought it would get better after I got him to punch me,” he said. "It’s _stupid_.”  

Stiles rolled his eyes. “Don’t piss him off on full moon days, they still make him a dickhead,” he said.

Isaac frowned. “It wasn’t—”

“Besides, he’s always stupid about Allison.” Stiles didn’t bother to make it sound like anything but fact. Isaac made a complicated face.

Sometimes Derek really resented having any Argents left in his life, however tangentially. “You remember she’s stabbed _and_ shot you. And your pack. Repeatedly,” he interjected.

“She’s helps us now,” Isaac said. “Besides, if she’d really meant it, we’d be dead.”

Derek rubbed his temples. “Fine. Whatever. What’s the problem.” He had no one but himself to blame for giving teenagers the bite. Well, Peter, since once Scott was turned Derek had to be around the high school anyway, but thinking about things to blame Peter for is a dense tangle of awful emotion he avoided as best he could. Isaac was Derek’s choice.

“Scott and Allison were perfect together,” Isaac said. Derek and Stiles both scoffed.

“I’m not sure even Scott really believes that anymore,” Stiles said at the sky. “Allison clearly doesn’t.”

“No two people are perfect for each other,” Derek said. He swallowed back old hurt, choked it down. He knew it was poison, when Peter said it about Paige. He’d known. “All good relationships take work. If anyone believes that they’re destined to be together no matter what, they’ll never work out their problems.”

He could see the skeptical comment on his expertise building on Isaac’s face, so he cut it off with, “Something my dad said.” It came out more harsh than he had meant to be, but Isaac was an orphan too. He would understand.

“Okay,” Isaac said instead, still doubtful, but at least he didn’t bring up Je—the darach. Derek let it go. His own relationships might be overwhelmingly short, disastrous, or both, but he’d had a house full of better examples, once, and their landlord in Cobble Hill was always giving advice to his family. Józef had been around since at least the early 18th century; he knew about people.

Derek glanced over at Stiles, uncharacteristically quiet for two minutes, but he had the soft sadness that meant he was thinking about his mom. Derek looked back at Isaac. “So. Scott and Allison still like each other. Most of the time. Neither of the Argents are trying to kill any of us, at the moment. Why aren’t Scott and Allison together now?”

Isaac grimaced. “I think it might be my fault,” he said. “I mean, Allison and I have been—she likes me too, or at least likes—Maybe if it weren’t for me, they’d be back together.”

Something was lurking in the dim corners of Derek’s memory, a piece of the casual gossip he usually tried to tune out. “Wasn’t there some other girl?” he asked.

“Kira,” Isaac said. “They did the ‘will they, won’t they,’ and then they didn’t. He said she doesn’t want to date anybody and would rather be friends.”

“That’s really the only acceptable excuse for turning down Scott,” Stiles joked.

“Yeah,” Isaac said. Stiles picked his head up from the ground to squint at him, frowning. “She sits with us at lunch now, but she’s a little… strange.”

“So she fits right in with the rest of you,” Derek said, and smirked at the perfunctory fingers he got in return.

“Kira’s the bardo girl,” Stiles said, “she heard us talking about our hallucinations and crap after the ice baths and said it sounded like bardo,” and that, Derek remembered clearly: the sound of Stiles’s breath coming high and panicked through the static of his cell phone, his voice breaking, Derek desperately trying to talk him down from a panic attack, pulled over on the side of the road, uselessly far away. “She’s too nice. Nobody’s that nice,” Stiles muttered. “Remember when I called you like, ‘what if we’re stuck in bardo, does it always end in death’ and you were like,” he curved his fingers in the air like claws, “‘Stiles, you idiot, bardo starts with death and ends in rebirth, you just have to make it all the way back’ and—”

“Was that supposed to be my voice?” Derek interrupted.

“It was perfect, I know,” Stiles gloated.

“Uncanny,” Isaac agreed.

“You always sound different to yourself, that’s probably why you were surprised.”

Derek tried to glower, but he didn’t actually care enough to make it effective. “Anyway,” he said pointedly, “So Scott at least tried to date someone else, was my point. You like Allison but want Scott to be happy. Scott may still like Allison, but he wants you to be happy too.”

Isaac started to object, but Stiles interrupted him. “Otherwise he wouldn’t feel bad about being a douche, dude.”

“Exactly,” Derek said. “Allison likes you both, to some unspecified extent. You all like spending time together.” Isaac hesitated, but nodded. “Okay.” It could be worse. “Scott seems to be a pretty important part of your relationship anyway.  Have you thought about trying polyamory?”

Stiles started choking on air and sat up like he’d been bitten by something. “What!”

Isaac was skeptical. “You mean like, we all date each other?”

“Sure,” Derek confirmed. Stiles was looking back and forth between them, mouth even further open than usual. They ignored him.

“I’m not sure Scott would—does he even like guys?” Isaac seemed to be mostly talking to himself, squinting into the trees. Derek’s shoulder twitched in a shrug. Teenagers were usually such a haze of constant arousal it was hard to be sure who anyone was specifically attracted to. Or what. He’s pretty sure Stiles had been attracted to a chair, once. Maybe more than once. He hadn’t asked.

“Pretty sure he’s not a Kinsey zero,” Stiles said reluctantly. It almost sounded like—Derek didn’t want to examine the stab of irrational jealousy.

“He’s not any kind of zero,” Isaac said, batting his eyelashes.

“Oh my god, I _hope_ the tentacle fungus eats your brain,” Stiles groused.

“You and Scott could both date Allison and stay friends. You just have to talk about it,” Derek said, with the vain hope of derailing their squabbling.

Stiles groaned and lay back on the ground. “No, this is terrible. Scott’s going to be having sex with both of you. That’s two people! That’s twice as much sex as me.”

Isaac was blushing a little bit. “I didn’t think you could multiply by zero, Stiles.”

Stiles waggled long fingers in the air obscenely and then flipped him off without looking. “Hey look at you, paying attention in remedial math class. Dickweed.” Stiles sat up and squinted at Derek. “Why would you encourage this? It sounds like a disaster.” Derek glared, willing him to shut up, but Stiles’s eyes got big. “Have _you—_ oh my god, of course, _look_ at you.”

 _Isn’t he beautiful_ , a memory whispered, and still, _still_ , for a moment he felt freezing panic.

Derek clenched his jaw. He flexed his fingers, took a breath. “I knew another triad,” he admitted to Isaac.

 “Stiles, shut _up_ ,” Isaac said, his eyes locked on Derek. “What was it like?”

“It wasn’t me,” Derek reiterated. “But it seemed like they just… loved each other.” Isaac was still staring expectantly. Derek scrubbed his face with his hands, scratched through his short beard.

“When Laura and I were in New York,” he had to stop for a second. Just saying that stirred up memories: their tiny apartment over the deli, the Manhattan skyline on a clear, cold night, Laura laughing so hard she almost fell off the roof. “I knew this guy Dave,” he forced out in a rush. “He was in this awful hardcore band, but sweet, smart.” They only slept together for maybe a month, but somehow stayed friends after, probably his sister’s fault. Laura had been so floored that Derek wanted to be around another person long enough for her to meet them that she hadn’t even teased that much, had kind of adopted him. He coughed uncomfortably. He didn’t know what was happening on his face. Stiles and Isaac were both staring like they’d never seen him before.

“He was your boyfriend,” Stiles said, like he was confused. “You had a _boyfriend_.”

“No. We weren’t serious.” He looked down at his hands, dug one under the carpet of pine needles to touch cool earth. “Anyway. He had an existential crisis, quit the city, moved out, up the Thames. Started working on an organic farm.” Took the hipster option, he couldn’t help but think—still couldn’t believe he’d done it. Grew an idiotic moustache and canned his own fucking pickles. “Um. He met a couple who were already married, and he renovated this old Victorian house with them. They wanted to open a B&B.” Derek had taken the train up a few times to help with the kitchen demo, roof, and landscaping, and maybe to make sure he was okay, still feeling protective. “They were… good together. Even though he wasn’t—they already had a relationship, there was room for him. They fit. The three of them… balanced. One day they made him dinner, filled the dining room with candles, and asked him to be their boyfriend.” Derek found himself almost smiling. Dave had called him after, so happy. “Last I heard, they were having a kid.” His smile went a little sad. He’d been looking forward to that. He hadn’t looked up Dave when he went back to get his stuff from Jó. It felt like too much had happened. “So. I know it can work.”

He glanced up. Isaac seemed hopeful, at least. He was a romantic at heart, liked stories with happy endings. Derek felt lighter, for a second, like it had been good to remember, like he’d done okay at something, maybe helped. Like he’d made a good choice.

Then Stiles opened his mouth, looking frustrated, for some reason, almost torn. He grimaced a little, and shook his head minutely, frowning at his hands. But he looked up, straight at Derek, and there was a cold flash of calculation, and what came out was, “So, was he evil? Statistically, I mean, he’s evil, right. If he wasn’t, you would have killed him,” and he kind of smirked, challenging, _smug_.

Isaac blinked, and sat up, and looked back and forth between Stiles and Derek. Derek’s face went from pretty close to smiling to kind of confused and then, eerily, completely blank, and not in the way it usually did, like he didn’t want anyone to know he had emotions, but like an overloaded fuse: total shut down. But Stiles said shitty stuff all the time. Like, that couldn’t be news to Derek. It wasn’t even totally wrong. He _did_ sleep with a serial killer. Nobody was going to forget that. It wasn’t even the first time Stiles had brought it up. But then the _scent_ hit him, this crazy wave of hurt and shame and betrayal, and okay, Derek could be a bastard too, but whatever made _that_ happen was definitely over a line.

At first, Derek didn’t actually register what Stiles had said, it was so far from anything he was expecting, and then he had to play it back in his head, confirm that he’d really—and it seemed like Stiles had been _thinking_ about it, was the—

The anger was almost comforting, familiar, as it swept over Derek like a blanket, a shield. He found himself on his feet. If he hadn’t just been thinking about Paige, maybe he could have let it go. If it hadn’t come out of _nowhere_ , if he hadn’t trusted—if he hadn’t _tried_. 

Isaac was frowning at Stiles. “What the hell,” he said.

Stiles was abashed, for once, his face sort of collapsing as if he’d just realized what—not that it helped. “Shit, no, I know, Derek, I didn’t—”

Suddenly the words were just there, like they’d been whispered to him, welling up behind his teeth, ready venom spitting its way out. “You know,” he repeated coldly, mechanically. “That’s right, as you keep reminding me, you _know_ ,” it came out sharp, and biting, and Derek felt a hard lump of ice freezing in his chest, a bitter shadow against his heart. “Like you know everything, right? Because people are just _puzzles_ to you, and you can’t _solve_ them without tearing off skin and digging into where it hurts most.” His hands were in fists at his sides. A slow drip of blood crept down his knuckles, cooling in the air. Stiles was curling in on himself, pale, and Derek scoffed. “You can’t help yourself, is that it? You know the worst things I never wanted to tell you, and you can’t _help_ but use it.”

Stiles looked like he wanted to sink into a hole in the ground, but he made an inarticulate sound of frustration and met Derek’s icy glare. “I didn’t _mean_ to, I don’t know why I said it, you know I don’t—we _did_ talk about it, and you told Jackson it wasn’t his fault—you can’t—”

A snarl tore itself from Derek’s throat, raw beyond healing. “Are you really trying to tell me that I can’t blame myself? _Now?_ That I was a kid, that Jennifer controlled me, like that _changes_ anything? If you actually _believed_ that, you wouldn’t have—” he turned on his heel. He felt sick. He felt poisoned. He had to leave.

Isaac sucked in an involuntary breath. “Oh,” was all he said, but now Stiles knew that Derek hadn’t told anybody else what the darach had done with her magic; Stiles had only known because he’d pretty much figured it out and ambushed him about it, like usual.

“ _Fuck_ , I’m sorry,” Stiles said, grip white-knuckled in his hair. “I’m _sorry_ , okay? I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean to say it.”

Derek shut his eyes and forced in a breath, shuddered it out, and made his claws slide free of his palms so the cuts could close. “Go home,” he said woodenly. He had to move. He forced his hands open, wiped the blood off on his jeans. Stiles watched, biting his lip, but stayed quiet. Derek went to the touchstone again, a compulsion, and the warm scrape of stone helped his head clear. He dropped the bag, walked out of the clearing like Stiles and Isaac weren’t there, and started running.

The banked anger flared, at first, at Stiles, at himself, at _her_ , at whatever was broken in him that made him so _easy_ to use. Maybe Kate would have found another way if he hadn’t been so _stupid_ , but she didn’t have to, because he was. He might as well have been the one who bit Paige, and dragging her out to the root cellar had fed the Nemeton, had given Jennifer the power to live. His whole shameful history gave Jennifer all the cracks she needed for her magic to hold him while she murdered innocent people. He should have killed her a dozen times over. He _could_ have. He didn’t.

He kept moving, sprinted, pushed himself, until his lungs burned and there was nothing for miles but wilderness. Eventually the anger bled out, and he could drop his shoulders, stop thinking, lose himself in simple rhythms: finding purchase for his feet, the pull of muscle, rush of breath. He caught the rare trail of a pine marten, and it was a good year for the wildflowers, by the creeks and up the slopes, and he knew them, and the rocks and trees, and they knew him, and it wasn’t so bad. It hadn’t been any worse than a dozen other thoughtless things Stiles had said to him, really, it was just—it had caught him off-guard. But he’d over-reacted, probably. And Stiles actually apologized, non-sarcastically, which might be a first.

He circled around to the trail again and let the teenagers catch up, turned and walked ahead of them. Stiles had his bag.

“Derek,” he said. He reached out to touch Derek’s arm, and Derek let him. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole.”

“I know, Stiles. It’s fine. You…” he stopped himself, sighed, rubbed his fingertips across the last shards of ice dug in under his breastbone. “I know you too well to expect otherwise.” He gave Stiles a gentle shove toward a tree to show he was forgiven. Stiles dodged around the trunk, ducked a branch, and sidled back next to Derek, his scent muddled with a chaotic mess of emotions.

“I don’t really think you just see people as puzzles,” Derek said.

Stiles glanced at him with a wry twist to his mouth. “I do, though. It’s just. Most people are boring ones.”

Derek didn’t know what to do with that. “So, you’re saying… I should be flattered.”

“Well, you know from experience how much effort it is to stalk someone,” he said, and Derek shook his head.

“I was wondering how you two hadn’t killed each other yet,” Isaac said, just on the edge of loud enough for Derek to hear. “Kind of disturbing, but I can see it.” It was probably—he ignored it. He would ignore it _forever_.

“So. Dave, huh?” Stiles said speculatively, watching Derek out of the corner of his eye with a slyness that made Derek suspect that he should have made him work harder for forgiveness.

“No.”

“C’mon!”

“No.”

“What was the name of his band?”

“No.”

“I feel like if you were his boyfriend, you shouldn’t badmouth his passion project. You should be supportive.”

Derek held up a finger for each point. “No. I wasn’t his boyfriend. It was shitty.”

“I bet you still went to his shows, though.”

“Well, obviously,” Derek finally relented. “That’s how I knew they were terrible.”

“You wore his band shirt all the time,” Stiles decided. Isaac just barely managed to turn a laugh into a cough. Derek shot a glance at the sky.

“I ran the merch table,” he said, matter-of-fact, like it wasn’t a confession. Isaac started laughing in earnest, and Stiles had to stop and gape.

“The merch table,” Stiles said, enunciating, savoring it, though Derek would have been surprised if he’d ever been to a show in his life. Maybe he would have, if he hadn’t been fighting with or against monsters since he’d gotten his license. Stiles was beaming anyway. “Where you would voluntarily interact with people who were _fans_. That is beautiful.” They walked along for a little bit, Stiles smiling to himself. He bumped Derek’s shoulder. “Why’d you break up? Creative differences?”

Sometimes there weren’t enough pieces left to fit with another person. Then there was the big secret, the everyday, unavoidable, lifechanging secret, that had him hiding half of whatever he had left every time he so much as breathed. “We weren’t—it wasn’t serious. We just. I liked him.”

Stiles seemed to accept that he’d reached the limit to how much he could pry for the day. He dropped back to Isaac and started talking about classes, and Derek kept half an ear on them while he watched the woods.

He’d never actually told anybody about werewolves, after Paige, until after he came back to Beacon Hills. Even then, Stiles and Jackson had already figured it out, Boyd nodded like it made sense, sure, explained a lot, and Isaac had seen _something_ tip over the excavator before Derek lifted it. Kate had never outright lied about knowing, had never tried, and he’d found out too late that Paige knew and liked him anyway. When he’d started struggling through unfulfilling hookups in Brooklyn, their two precedents were a strong deterrent from letting anyone else find out. With other wolves, it was easier, if you found each other, if your packs didn’t care; you could snap your teeth, let out your claws, your strength, stay close for the night if nobody got territorial. If they were even interested after they saw his eyes burn blue.

He heard—he stopped and held a hand out for silence. Stiles took two more steps, but Isaac caught the back of his shirt and with a little _hrk_ he stopped and stayed quiet, rubbing his throat and glaring at Isaac instead. When Derek turned, they relaxed to see that he wasn’t worried. He pointed at Isaac, then to his own ear, with his eyebrows up in question. Isaac rolled his eyes, but he also smiled a little, then focused.

“A bunch of birds,” he said first, barely audible to Stiles but clear to Derek. He pointed up in the trees, especially by the creek. Derek nodded. “Something in the water. A fish?” he guessed.

“Frogs. Keep going.”

“Is that… a squirrel?” He pointed into the underbrush.

“Yes,” Derek said. “Try underground,” he hinted, and gave him a direction. Isaac closed his eyes and concentrated.

“Oh!” he found it. “A burrow!” He grinned. “One big one and… three little ones?”

“Yeah.” Derek nodded, smiling back a little. “Can you guess?”

“Bigger than rabbits. Like… dog-sized. Small dogs.” Derek waited while he thought about it, and Isaac finally lifted his nose to scent the air. “Foxes?”

“Good,” he said. “A vixen and kits.” He reached out, then caught himself guiltily, looked for permission. Isaac cocked his head, but nodded, almost too small to see. Derek went for his shoulder, and Isaac tentatively touched his arm. They stood there for a moment, half-smiling at each other. “Any time you want to run, I wouldn’t mind the company,” Derek said, quiet, before he lost the nerve.

“Thanks. For today.” Isaac flicked a glance toward Stiles. “It was not boring,” he said, and unleashed the curling grin that usually accompanied moderate property damage, and Derek thought, oh, shit. He wasn’t Isaac’s alpha anymore. He might have to resort to bribery.

Stiles interrupted his growing trepidation by clapping him and Isaac on the shoulders and leaning in with exaggerated impatience. “That was pretty cool! I assume. You could be faking. But I’m _literally_ so hungry my stomach has started digesting itself.” Derek and Isaac shared another look and rolled their eyes. The three of them agreed on a diner by the time they got to the last touchstone back to the house, and Stiles said he’d see if anyone else wanted to meet them there. He lagged behind while typing, startled from a harsh caw and flap of wings from a bush, tripped on a root, threw out one hand in front of himself for protection, and scraped his palm on a waist-high rock. He shook off what felt almost like an electric shock, frowning absently, sent the text, rubbed his palm on his jeans as phantom warmth crept up his hand, stopped, looked back, grimaced, mouthed a curse, smacked himself a few times on the forehead with the hand holding his phone, and ran to catch up to where Derek and Isaac had disappeared around a bend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: A character is reminded of past trauma, is triggered a little bit, dissociates briefly. Some secrets are accidentally revealed. Character(s) who cause hurt apologize pretty quickly, though only for what they realize was hurtful. Derek is pretty down on himself. All of that is like, 900 words total, and everyone's okay by the end of the chapter.
> 
> Mentions of 3b canon violence (Scott punching Isaac), Paige, Kate, and the darach.


	7. What the Fuck Part 1: Blood and Magic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little bit of Stiles pov!

Stiles got a text from Derek the next day during his free period. _Meet me outside._ He had a solitary, relentlessly stubborn, Scott-like hope that whatever Derek needed wouldn’t be very important and/or wouldn’t take long, but realistically, if either of those were true he would have texted specifics, since he texted now. Stiles was allowed to be smug about it, okay, training him into that had been a lot of work. Mostly he hoped that whatever Derek needed wouldn’t keep him out of third period math and wouldn’t involve running. He was exhausted, even though he was _pretty sure_ he’d slept a lot, and still hungry after emptying the vending machine of Reese’s cups, because he’d skipped breakfast because he’d seriously grossed himself out coughing up an actual _bug_ that morning, so it wasn’t exactly a great day, overall, so far.

The side door was still swinging shut when he was shoved up against the exterior bricks with barely restrained fury. “What the _fuck_ did you do,” Derek growled, just right up in his face. Stiles winced and tried not to scrape his fragile human skin against the rough wall behind him. Okay, the wall-shoving was definitely a setback in his friendship (friendship? Friendship.) with Derek, yes, but part of him had weirdly kind of missed it. Maybe a few parts. Maybe it wasn’t that weird. He licked his lips. No, it was weird.

“You might need to be more specific? I do a lot of things,” he tried. He was pretty sure he knew, though, but they’d just _had_ a fight, and he—Derek snarled at him, big fist tightening in the flannel, eyes burning blue. Shit. Awkward. His instinctive response to that was in no way conducive to a long life. What were they talking about? Oh. “I didn’t mean to!” he protested. “I hit it when I tripped!”

Derek backed off minutely; he’d heard the truth. But his eyes narrowed. “Didn’t. Mean. To. _What_ ,” he bit out, dangerously quiet.

“I didn’t mean to touch one of your special rocks,” Stiles said, a little resentfully.

Derek kind of shook him against the brick, and Stiles grabbed his forearm as it flexed, and it was warm, and strong, and very hard to let go. “How did you _know_ ,” Derek demanded. Stiles rolled his eyes.

“Dude, you pet the same rocks every time we walk past. Like all the time. And your face does a thing.” Stiles waved in the direction of said stupidly attractive face, still scowling but also, maybe scared? And confused. Likewise, buddy. “I figured it was like, territory marking.” He tried to shrug around the rock-hard bar of werewolf muscle pressed hotly to his chest. “It’s better than peeing on trees, so,” Derek’s fist clenched again. “It’s totally fine if you do that too!” he yelped. Oh my god, he had to stop talking. “It was an accident!” he reiterated, “Holy shit, I won’t do it again.”

Derek was still frowning hard. “How is that possible,” he said, as if he’d never seen Stiles literally fall out of a stationary chair. “It smells like your _blood_.”

“I scraped my hand, remember?” He held out his palm as evidence. It was still a little raw, but barely deep enough to scab, and Derek had made him clean it.

“More blood than that,” he said, which, okay, freaky for several reasons. “You really didn’t mean to do anything.” Confusion and worry were definitely overtaking the anger.

“No! It seemed important. It was nice you let Isaac, I guess, whatever, but I don’t want to mess with your wolfy stuff.”

“You could—” Derek stopped. “I wouldn’t mind. If you did. You can.”

Stiles just stared at him for a minute to see if Derek would recognize how crazy that was. No luck. His eyes narrowed and he poked a finger back in Derek’s very firm chest. “If you really mean that, then _what the hell_ are you so pissed about?” Derek let him up from the wall and pulled his hand back to rub absently where Stiles had poked him. Stiles told himself he wasn’t sad about it, and also, that he needed to get a grip. Ugh, phrasing.

“You’re done for the day, right?” Derek asked.

“No, I have a—” Derek looked at him. “Yes,” he amended. 

“Let’s go.”

“But I—” Derek’s eyebrow twitched. “Okay.”

The truck was in the visitor lot, so Stiles just ducked his head behind his hand like he was avoiding the paparazzi and hoped nobody saw who would narc on him for ditching. As Derek pulled away from the school toward the preserve, he texted Lydia to put his backpack in his locker. She said she would, in exchange for an explanation later. He glanced at Derek, whose hands were carefully at ten and two while he glared at the light traffic and went the speed limit, something Stiles knew for a fact was _wildly_ out of character. Explaining Stiles in the car during school hours if a deputy pulled them over would be awkward, though, for sure.

“Sorry for the,” Stiles gestured awkwardly. He couldn’t really help it, but.

Derek gave him a side-eye, then shook his head a little. “It’s fine. I should expect it, by now,” he said.

“You really should,” he agreed emphatically. Derek almost smiled, but it was strained. “So how bad is it?” Stiles asked. “Like, you’re clearly freaking out, but not calling anyone else.”

“I don’t _know_ ,” Derek said. “It smells like your blood and magic, and—” He shook his head. “I have to show you.”

A few minutes later, they were standing shoulder to shoulder in a litter of leaves. Both had their arms crossed, Derek tense and still, Stiles bouncing on his toes, calm in the way he got when he was bottling up a freak-out for later. They stared at the unassuming grey boulder Stiles had run into the day before. It was dotted with lichen, nested in straggly new fern and little nodding bulbous purple flowers. “Okay,” Stiles said. “Uh.” A dark spiral triskele, twin to the one tattooed between Derek’s shoulder blades and emblazoned on the floor of his loft, looked like it had been carved with perfectly smooth lines into the surface of the rock, about half an inch deep. Carved or burned. “I think we need to talk to Deaton.”

~~~

The vet clinic was usually quiet this time of day, and this afternoon was no exception. Derek flipped the sign to closed on the way in, standard practices well established. The mountain ash gate was shut. Stiles slumped in a chair, legs stretched out, while Derek stood and brooded. There was somebody in the back room, and after a little bit listening to them, Derek’s eyes widened just the tiniest bit and he started biting back a smirk, the prolonged adrenaline of the morning giving way to a kind of giddiness. Stiles caught it immediately and reached over to poke him in the side. “Tell me. Hey, c’mon,” he whispered. “Tell me, tell me tell me.”

Derek slapped his hand away but stepped around and sat next to him, leaned close. “There’s a guy back there with a snake,” he murmured, and Stiles suppressed a shiver at the sudden warmth and ghost of breath. Derek’s voice was a warring combination of amusement and consternation. “It ate a ping pong ball. It’s recovering from surgery.” He was fighting not to laugh. “It’s the _fifth time_. The guy—” he broke off, shook his head. “The guy doesn’t even have a ping pong table. He doesn’t buy them. He’s feels like he’s going insane. He has _no idea_ where it keeps getting them.” Stiles burst out laughing, loud and ridiculous; his hands clapped over his face almost immediately but did nothing to dampen it, and if it felt like Derek’s answering laugh was aimed just as much at him, it was so, so worth it. That’s how Deaton found them when he poked his bald head around the corner from the examination room, frowning as Stiles wheezed and Derek snickered, and he escorted the guy with the snake out a few minutes later.

“Boys,” Deaton reprimanded sternly, looking between them. “It’s no laughing matter. That animal is truly suffering.” There was a suspicious crinkle around his eyes, though.

“Does it have a history of depression,” Stiles snarked, and that was dark as hell but Derek laughed again. Stiles grinned at him, bright and toothy, like he’d won a prize.

Deaton turned to lead them back toward the main exam room while Stiles opened the rowan gate, and they followed, already sobering, the tension creeping back into Derek’s shoulders.

“Since neither of you appears to be bleeding, to what do I owe this visit?”

They glanced at each other and decided Derek should start. He crossed his arms. “Is there anything magical about the touchstones in the woods?”

Deaton regarded them serenely. “They’re a sort of territory marker, as you know, but I wouldn’t think they’d be magically active, no.”

“Stiles bled on one and now there’s a triskelion etched in the surface,” Derek said flatly.

Deaton’s eyes widened as he shot a baffled, slightly angry look at Stiles “ _Why_ would you—”

“It was an accident!” Stiles defended, yet _again_.

Deaton stared at him. “It was an… accident.”

“So, they are magical,” Derek concluded.

“Well, they could have magical effects. If activated.”

Stiles grimaced and made strangling motions behind his back. “Are you saying I activated them?” he asked.

“It would appear so.” The veterinarian seemed pained. “What were you thinking about when you touched it?” he asked reluctantly.

Stiles’s eyes unfocused as he searched his memory. The stupid bird had startled him while he was texting everyone to meet up at … “Curly fries.”

Deaton rested three fingers on his forehead and shook his head minutely. “And the shape is the Hale family triskelion.”

“Yes,” they said together. Stiles dug his phone out of his pocket and showed him a picture.

After a long, impenetrable look at Stiles and a quick one at Derek, Deaton sighed. “Well. Nothing may come of it. It shouldn’t be any more dangerous for either of you.”

“What does it _mean_?” asked Derek, frowning.

“Stiles and his spark have been somehow tied to your family’s territory.” Derek rolled his eyes, but at least it confirmed the _completely obvious_.

“Do you mean like, through the Nemeton?” asked Stiles. “Because we’re both tied to it?” 

“Perhaps.” Deaton hesitated. “Though it would be more common for such a bond to be as an emissary,” he said carefully.

They stared at him for a moment, then simultaneously burst with objections.

“I thought only druids could be emissaries! Am I a druid? I’m not a druid, am I?” Stiles panicked.

“He would be _Scott’s_ emissary, and I’m not an _alpha_ ,” Derek bit out.

“Oh my god, I would be such a bad druid.” Stiles started to chew on a nail but missed and bit his finger.

“As you say,” Deaton said, not quite as unflappable as usual, watching them both thoughtfully as Stiles shook out his hand. “There will be books for him in the vault, if this is something you want to pursue,” he said to Derek. He turned and left the examination room, locked the door to his office behind him.

Derek threw up his arms “I _looked_ in the vault,” he yelled at the door.

“ _Am I a druid or not_ ,” Stiles shouted.

“You’re not,” Derek said to him, short with residual annoyance.

Stiles pushed his shoulder like he was picking a fight. “How do _you_ know?” he glared. “I could be!”

“Your magic smells more…” like you, he couldn’t say. “Fizzy.”

“Fizzy. Are you fucking— _fizzy_ , really.”

Derek gave him a pointed shrug. “Effervescent. Ethereal. Musujący.” It was completely different from druid magic, which always had some element of rich earth, life only in balance with death.

“Okay. Fine. Great. And in Polish. Thanks.” Stiles crossed his arms and tapped his foot. “ _Smells_ _more fizzy_ ,” he muttered. He closed his eyes and took a breath. When he opened them, they drilled into Derek’s with unerring acuity. “What vault?”

Derek rolled his shoulders and sighed. “We’ll have to wait for dark. You want to go back to class, or get some food?”

They got Indian, took it to the loft, and looked through Derek’s books for anything about magic rocks until it was time for lacrosse. Well, Derek looked through books; Stiles fell asleep for a few hours improbably slumped halfway off the couch and ate all the leftovers before practice. To kill time until lacrosse was out, Derek ran the trails around the school. He thought he should probably make a point of running here more often, outside of cross country season, since Boyd used to during ROTC training, and the lacrosse team didn't leave the field. This definitely counted as Scott’s territory now, and he didn’t know how Scott could ignore the itch to secure it, but somebody had to.

Stiles called him as it was just turning dark. Derek silenced it, hanging up without answering as soon as his phone started to vibrate. He let himself smirk and turned the corner, leaned against the brick casually just as Stiles pushed his way through the doors closest to the parking lot. Stiles looked up from frowning at his phone and gave a start, almost dropping it. “Asshole! You all have way too much fun sneaking up on me,” he accused.

“You jump like a squirrel,” Derek said, smirking.

Stiles glared in a way probably meant to be intimidating. “Someday I’ll figure out how to get you back.”

“Sure,” Derek humored him.

“I’ll put mountain ash in your boxer briefs,” Stiles threatened, and Derek _valiantly_ resisted any comment on Stiles thinking about his underwear. “I’ll rub raw shrimp on the walls of the loft!”

Derek felt his face twist in disgust. “I would move.”

“Ha!”

“To _Canada_.”

Stiles waved it away. “They still text in Canada,” which—like _that_ was the most important consideration. “Whatever! Stop with the eyebrows, let’s get this heist on the road.”

Derek fell into step and started guiding him toward the main vault lock. “It’s not a heist if I let us in. It’s literally my inheritance.”

Stiles glared at him. “Okay maybe _heist_ was my last-second replacement word for _quest_ , which I was embarrassed about but now I’m just going to run with. We’re raiding a secret werewolf base for magic stuff a druid told us about. Just let me have this.”

“We’re not raiding, either. Still mine,” Derek argued. Stiles scoffed. Derek decided to consider it an acknowledgement of his absolute logical victory and changed the subject. “The touchstones out here have the triskele too, by the way. It’s probably on all of them.”

“Must be some kind of network,” Stiles said thoughtfully. “Which actually just raises more questions, like how, and who built it, and why, and what does it do, and wow I hope we find a book with literally anything helpful.”

They stopped at the entrance, and Derek let his claws out. Stiles squinted at him and then at the post the lock was embedded in. “Seriously? The high school sign?”

“The vault was here first. Hidden in plain sight, like us,” Derek said, and he hooked his claws into the stonework knot of a shield glyph and turned. The sign rotated on its axis with a faint grind of stone on stone, opening to a stairway at their feet that lead down into the dark.


	8. The Vault

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would read a million fics about Weird Stuff in the Vault.
> 
> No warnings apply!

The stairs ended on a clear aisle through a wide room cluttered with crates, cabinets, and open industrial shelving. An indirect blue glow, like lights under water, cast eerie twisting patterns on the hewn stone, rough cement, and exposed pipes of the walls. The shelves seemed organized, but by an indecipherable method; carved wood, glass jars, and galvanized metal boxes were interspersed with what could be museum specimens: odd statuettes, glittering stones, what might be a collection of skulls, a tea set. A heavy safe sat on a sturdy little table off to one side, and a round slice of a tree trunk, easily eight feet across, leaned against another wall. Derek led Stiles to a stack of shelves half-full of leather-bound books. At least, he started to, but realized about halfway that Stiles had frozen with one foot still on the bottom step. Derek walked back to him.

“Holy shit, Derek,” he said, eyes roving around the room. “What is all this stuff?”

Derek felt his shoulders start to hunch and turned the motion into a stiff shrug. “Most of it, I don’t know. C’mon. Books are over here.”

Stiles seemed to shake himself out of it and took a few steps, still trying to catalogue everything on the shelves, though there weren’t labels and human eyes didn’t do well in dim light. Derek stuck a hand out to catch him when he tripped, then steered him around a locked chest. “Holy shit,” Stiles repeated when he saw the books, this time reverently. “Those aren’t books, those are _tomes_.”

Derek drew in a breath to reply, but stopped and scrubbed one hand over his face instead. “Seriously, Stiles? _Now_?”

“First of all, get your nose out of my business,” Stiles said impatiently, already running his fingers over thick leather spines. “Second, _yes_ , and third, fuck off. You’ve been holding out on me,” he reproached.

“None of the ones still here seemed that useful,” Derek defended. “You’ve seen the rest at the loft. The only thing close was that book on Celtic runes and glyphs.”

“You took the bad herbology book but left _Pack Lineages of the American Revolution_?”

Derek crossed his arms. “Yes,” he said, not bothering to hide his disgust, and Stiles laughed. “I needed a plant guide, and that history is both poorly supported and depressingly racist.”

Stiles grinned down at the next book in his hand, _Zenobia: The Wolf of Palmyra_. “You nerd.”

“You’d like that one,” Derek said, instead of something childish about like recognizing like. “There’s pretty good evidence that most of Palmyra knew their queen was a shifter.”

After a good half hour skimming titles and tables of contents and arguing academic merit, Stiles reluctantly agreed that there wasn’t anything that seemed to be specifically for him. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting like, _Baby’s First Magic Primer_ , but I don’t think you missed one. Unless there are more books anywhere else?”

“Not that I’ve seen. There may be something in a box, but there’s no catalogue; it could be anywhere.”

Stiles sighed, leaned back against the shelf where he’d ended up on the ground, and let his eyes wander around the room. He sat up again. “Wait, what about over there?” he said, pointing at a blank wall.

Derek looked back and forth between his finger and the wall, frowning. “What are you talking about?”

“The shelf in the little room.” Stiles stood up and walked in the direction he’d pointed. Derek stepped forward at the last minute to catch him as he walked straight into a wall, but instead of bouncing off, he disappeared through it. His steady heartbeat cut off like—

“Stiles?” Derek did not panic. Could the fake wall have teleported him somewhere? Was that even possible? He reached out to touch it, but his fingers met cold stone and nothing happened. “Stiles?” he said again, louder.

Stiles’s head poked back out of the wall, frowning. “What the hell, dude?” he said. “I’m right here.”

Derek grabbed his shirt at the neck and pulled him out. Stiles came easily, arms windmilling to keep his balance. “Oh my god,” he complained, then re-evaluated when he saw Derek’s face. “Oh my god!” he exclaimed, bouncing on his toes as his arms flailed out. “It’s a secret room in the secret vault!” He ran back in. “This is the c—” it cut off as he passed through.

“It just looks like a wall,” Derek said, to all appearances speaking to the wall itself. “I can’t hear you in there. I can’t hear anything.”

Stiles re-emerged. “That really freaks you out, huh?” he said, and held out his phone. “Here, I took a picture of the other side.” It was set up like a small office, a desk and chair facing the door, warm wood shelves with more jars, boxes, and miscellany. Behind the desk chair, an entire shelf was stacked with books.

“Oh,” Derek said, all he could say.

“This must be what Deaton meant. I gotta go through these, for sure.”

“Yeah.” Derek ran his fingers over the wall again, searching for a seam, for any way it was discernable from true stone two feet to the side. Stiles passed through while he was looking, the only sign a faint, singular ripple.

Derek’s phone vibrated in his pocket. “Hey,” Stiles said as he answered it, and Derek felt his chest ease. “I’m gonna put you on speaker while I do a first pass, I don’t know how long it’ll take.” Derek could almost hear him bouncing with excitement.

“Sure,” Derek said, and slid to the floor as he focused on the way his quiet breaths and faint heartbeat came through the tinny speakers of the phone. He picked up _The Complete and Unabridged Journals of Theodore Roosevelt_ from the pile going to Stiles. After a moment, the toe of a ratty Converse poked through the stone wall, and then the rest of Stiles’s foot followed more deliberately. Derek snagged it and circled his ankle with his fingers, gentle but firm. “Okay?” he checked.

“Yeah, dude, like, I wouldn’t say no to a beanbag chair, but this is alright. Relatively low risk of tetanus, for one of your hideouts,” Stiles said. Derek could barely hear the sound of pages turning, the thump of leather covers hitting the floor or landing in piles, over Stiles’s tuneless humming, muffled and damp from his fingers in his mouth. Stiles hissed, suddenly, just as Derek had started to force himself to relax.

“What,” Derek said, ready to pull him out at the slightest provocation.

“Paper cut,” Stiles groused, and Derek huffed a laugh.

“Stop bleeding on everything.”

“Only since you asked so nicely.”

Derek hummed and settled back against the wall. “Your foot vibrates when you talk, a little bit before I can hear you,” Derek told him, shifting against the wall.

“Bone conduction is faster than transmission lag,” Stiles said, over the sound of flipping pages.

Derek thought about sound waves buzzing between living cells, echoing across joints and down limbs, from skin to skin, while their digital record raced out of the atmosphere and back. “Huh.”

“I wonder if you could figure out what I was saying just from feeling the vibrations, if you couldn’t hear me, that would be cool.”

Derek did not want to get sidetracked with experiments, especially any that would keep Stiles there any longer than he had to be. “Anything good?” he asked.

“I’m on, uh… _Telluric Currents and Energetic Substrata_. I figured, start with something I at least recognize, right? _Mechanics of Glyph Design_ seems really cool but kind of advanced. There’s pictures, at least. This one on energy transmission might be good too, it seems like, more fundamental.” He flipped through a few more, and Derek relaxed a little as he listened, Stiles’s foot tapping against his thigh.

Until he tensed completely and his grip went too tight on Stiles’s ankle. “Wait, all these books, they’re in English?”

“Hey, ow!” Stiles said, then “…Huh,” and, “Yeah.” There was a long pause. “I think it may be a magic thing.”

Derek tried not to growl, and let his head fall back against the wall.

“So,” Stiles said eventually, after another pause, sounding nervous. “I kind of want to take all of these.”

Derek recognized that it was a question. “They’re obviously safe down here, but it’s not a good idea to open the door a lot. Even in this town, somebody will notice eventually.”

“Right,” Stiles said, after a beat. “Of course. They’re important family heirlooms and they belong down here. I’ll just visit. When you can let me in.”

Derek frowned at his phone like it could transmit that too. “No, so you should take them, I mean. They’re not doing us any good in there.”

Stiles ducked through the wall to look him in the eye, leaning out so the stone looked like it cut across his shoulder. “Really? Seriously? You’re okay with that?”

“Yeah.” Then Stiles would never have a reason to go back into that dead-quiet room.

“I don’t—maybe I should just take one at a time. I can’t protect them.”

“They might be able to protect themselves, if they're enchanted.” Stiles blinked at him. Derek shook his head. “If you need more, nobody else can get them for you,” he pointed out. Stiles’s mouth turned down. Derek raised his eyebrows. Stiles scrunched his face on one side. Derek glared. “ _You_ wanted to—Fine. Okay. What if you start with the almanac from 1988 and two more, and we get a safe to keep them in?”

Stiles chewed on his lip. “Okay,” he said, “Yeah, okay. That would make me feel better. Can we pick one up now?”

“Yeah. We’ll have to go to Chico, but we can get dinner, too.”

~~~

They got back to Stiles’s house late that night. The Sheriff glanced over his shoulder from the couch and went from relaxed to deceptively alert as they came in, Derek carrying a sizeable fireproof safe and Stiles with a cardboard box of books from the vault and secret study (“tomes and _grimoires_ , Derek”).

The Sheriff's stare was piercing. “Derek. Stiles. Anything you boys should be telling me?”

Stopped abruptly in the foyer, Derek glanced at Stiles out of the corner of his eye just in time to see Stiles doing the same. If they hadn’t looked guilty before, they certainly did now.

“Sheriff.” Derek cleared his throat. “I’m going to install this upstairs, if that’s alright.” He raised the fairly massive grey steel box a few inches, in case he’d missed it.

The Sheriff was trying not to laugh. “So far so good,” he said, encouraging. Derek turned his head and raised his eyebrows at Stiles, who looked like he was wishing for a meteor to hit the house to get him out of the conversation.

“It’s for books, not like, guns and drugs,” Stiles said, like he meant it to be reassuring and not at all suspicious. “Um. These books.”

“Uh huh.” The Sheriff turned around all the way on the couch. “Why do these books need to be in a safe, and why does that safe need to be here?”

From the mix of emotions coming off of him and the way he kept shifting from foot to foot, Stiles had not been keeping his dad apprised of his magic practice. “Family heirlooms,” Derek said. “Stiles is studying them.” The Sheriff stood up. Stiles glared at Derek and immediately tried to school his expression like there was any chance his dad hadn’t caught it.

“They’re not porn or anything,” Stiles said hastily, and when he saw Derek’s face he winced and added, “Not that they would be, that would be…weird,” and Derek was just about ready to drop the safe and leave.

The Sheriff shook his head at Stiles, almost laughing. “Mind if I take a look?” he asked mildly, and walked toward them. Stiles’s heart was racing.

Derek shrugged his assent, kind of curious what he would think, and it wasn’t like they could make a _worse_ impression. The protections worked into the books wouldn’t harm him; when Derek opened them, the pages stuck together, and he could tell there was ink, but it was like trying to read out of the corner of his eye, only vaguely organized into lines. They didn’t smell like anything, not even paper. The Sheriff picked one up from the top of the pile. “ _Sprites, Sylphs, Salamanders, and Other Semicorporeal Species_ ,” he read slowly. “Oh… kay.” The safe was starting to get heavy, but he didn’t dare put it down.

“Impressive dedication to alliteration,” Stiles said nervously.

The Sheriff flipped through it, traded it for another. Or, he tried to; as he picked up one of the grimoires with gauffered edges, his eyes went a little glazed, and he set it back down in favor of the book under it. He frowned as he read that title. “Teddy Roosevelt? Really?”

Derek tilted his head neutrally. He could feel Stiles trying to glare a hole into the side of his face.

“Dad, c’mon, don’t keep us down here to see how long Derek can hold up a safe,” Stiles cajoled.

The Sheriff smiled a little. “Alright, you got me. This stuff, though,” he waved his hand around the box. “You and I—” he pointed at his son and back to himself, “—are going to talk about it later.”

“Greatthanksbye,” Stiles said and bolted up the stairs, tripping forward and catching himself at the top step. Derek found himself sharing a commiserating look with the Sheriff, just for a second, until they realized it. The Sheriff coughed and went back to the couch; Derek kept his head down and followed Stiles up the stairs.

He shut the door set the safe down while Stiles cleared out the floor of his closet. “I thought you would have told him.” A pair of ratty shoes flew toward him with particular force. Derek crossed his arms. “You hate keeping secrets from your dad.” Stiles mumbled something that was covered by the scrape of a plastic storage tub against the wall as he dragged it out. “What does he think you’ve been doing in the woods?”

That got Stiles back into the room, though he immediately started pacing, hands darting in tight jerks as he talked. “I said I’m learning about supernatural stuff and self-defense, which is _true_. And I told him we go hiking and run sometimes, which he actually had a harder time believing.” His hands opened and closed unconsciously. “I just. I thought mountain ash was a human thing. Now it seems like maybe not, any more, or, or I’m human but also some kind of magic.” He made a frustrated noise. “Or I’m actually crazy and these are fake.”

“The wall was solid stone to me,” Derek reminded him. Stiles flapped a hand ungratefully. “For what it’s worth, you still smell human.”

“Oh right, yeah, thanks for that. Human and _fizzy_.”

“Human and fizzy,” Derek agreed placidly. Burnt sugar and sly determination with that brightness like pop rocks, under soap and deodorant and Adderall, sometimes his weird-flavored gum. Derek would know it anywhere, could pick it out of a crowd, follow the trace of it down streets and hallways even when other scents fought to bury it. “It’s not bad,” he offered.

“Dick,” Stiles said half-heartedly. He scrubbed his hand through his hair. “Make yourself useful,” he ordered, kicked the safe with the soft toe of his sneakers, jerked his chin toward the space he’d made. Derek gave him a flat look, but hefted the thing and crouched to set it gently against the closet’s back wall, under a wild rainbow of plaid flannel.

Stiles was digging through the box of books when he finished, blushing faintly. Derek rolled his eyes. “You should take the glyph book, too. The one at the loft,” he said, instead of anything to embarrass him more.

“No, you keep that one. I already made notes from it.” Stiles set aside one grimoire then dragged the box toward his closet to start loading the rest into the safe. They all fit, books he could read on the left and magic on the right, with some space left over. Derek’s attention slipped away from the tooled leather bindings from the hidden room if he didn’t concentrate on remembering they were there. They made him uneasy, and he felt stupid for feeling relieved when the metal door locked shut.

“Promise me you won’t do anything idiotic with those,” he said, too harsh, as he started to second-guess himself; he didn’t even know what he was leaving with Stiles, not really. Stiles was smart, sure, but curiosity overwhelmed his self-preservation too easily and often. “Don’t try anything without m—without someone around.”

Stiles turned away from the safe and looked up at him from the ground, started to frown petulantly, but he read something in Derek’s scowl that made him concede. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “I’ll see what there is, but I’ll be careful.” He crossed his legs and settled on the floor just outside the closet, arms loose, hands dangling.

“Okay. Good,” Derek said, suddenly feeling out of place. He started to cross his arms, but stuck his fists in his pockets instead. “We could,” he started, but no, he couldn’t, he changed his mind mid-sentence. “It might be better to get a human to teach you how to fight.”

Stiles seemed confused. “What?”

“You said self-defense. I only know how to—I’ve always been a werewolf. It’s different.”

Stiles waved it away. “Yeah, no, magical self-defense, I meant, but. Yeah. I mean. I took some classes. A while ago.” He rubbed his cheek. “Last summer. I might, you know. Do more.”

“Oh. Good.” Derek stared at the ground. There had been bruises, after he’d healed from Gerard, but between lacrosse and how often Stiles ran into walls and furniture he hadn’t thought twice, hadn’t asked. His shoulders started to hunch, but he forced them down. It might be valuable for Stiles to spar with a wolf, against claws and inhuman strength, but Derek—he didn’t think it should be him. His hand came up to scratch through the short hairs on the back of his neck. “Yoga,” he blurted, and immediately went on the defensive, “I started with Cora and—it’s useful. Strength. Balance.” Flexibility, oh gods, he was _such_ an idiot, that wasn’t better than sparring at all.

“Yoga,” Stiles said, frankly disbelieving. “You do yoga?”

Derek kept his face blank. “Helps keep me centered. If you ask me again, I’ll rip your face off,” he said.

Stiles grinned at him. “Okay, Detective Diaz.” Derek raised his eyebrows. Stiles faltered. “Brooklyn 99? Right? Rosa Diaz? We watched it after—”

Derek scrunched his eyebrows like Stiles was an idiot. “You mean my cousin?”

Stiles stabbed a finger at him, then drew it back. His sudden grin was blinding. “You’re fucking with me!” he accused.

“I think you’d know,” Derek said nonchalantly, finally letting himself smile as Stiles spluttered. This was getting out of hand. He should go. He threw a longing look at the window, but he knew he’d have to walk out past the Sheriff, instead. “I guess I’ll see you.”

“Movie!” Stiles burst out, and he looked as surprised as Derek felt, but kept talking, sprang up and flung himself into the rolling chair at his desk. “C’mon, I know you don’t have anywhere else to be. Sit, stay, I’ll put on a movie while I study.” He pulled up Netflix on his laptop, knees jittering.

Derek refused to laugh at dog jokes out of principle, and he’d been around Stiles practically all day, but… the vault left him drained the same way as Laura’s boxes, and he didn’t _want_ to leave. All the more reason that he should, probably. But. He smoothed out the comforter and sat cautiously at the edge of the bed. It smelled like—his eyes flicked away from the trashcan next to the bed. It was a teenager’s room, anyway, and old socks and food left out and drinks high in caffeine, and Stiles spent a lot of time there, obviously. Derek could tell Scott still visited, though not as much as he used to, and Lydia had been by pretty recently, and that kid Danny. Derek hadn’t been up here for a while, just came close enough to the house when he ran at night to check the heartbeats, and for some reason he felt like more of an intruder now than all the times he’d come through the window without an invitation. The chemosignals sunk into the carpet and sheets were different than they used to be, too, dense and awful with lingering fear and the sour stress of a body exhausted. Derek carefully took off his shoes and set them, neatly paired, out of the way with their toes under the bed. He flopped backward on the bed with his arms out, the most he’d give in to the twin urges to leave a sign of himself and scrub out the trace of nightmares, as if that could help keep them from happening.

Stiles put on the Firefly movie, rolled the chair over to the bed with it, and prodded Derek until he’d shifted from the edge to lean against the headboard. He’d been unreasonably triumphant when he’d managed to badger Derek into watching the show, but it was nice to make someone happy with something that simple. Stiles climbed in next to him, curled up with his back to Derek’s thigh around his math homework. Stiles bounced his attention back and forth between the pages and the screen in a way that was no less baffling to Derek for how familiar it had become. He casually skipped the video forward a few minutes when a side character was paralyzed, and Derek, surprised into taking a breath, realized his own fists had been clenched. He rested his hand on Stiles’s side for a second in thanks, or solidarity, and Stiles touched their fingers together.

At some point, Derek was startled out of a doze by a noise on the stairs, and he raised his head from where he’d slumped toward Stiles, just his shoulder still against the headboard. Stiles’s dad opened the door, stuck his head into the room, and did a double take. His eyes narrowed. “Good night, boys,” he said. “Stiles, we are going to have that talk tomorrow. A long talk. Maybe several talks. Be home for dinner.”

Stiles covered his face with the book. “G’night dad, love you, please leave.”

The Sheriff’s laser focus shifted to Derek. “Derek, you can stay until the end of the movie. I’ll be here all night.” Derek nodded sharply and told himself it was too dark in the room for humans to see his ears go red. Stiles waved at him from behind the book, both reassurance and a plea, and the Sheriff shut the door, took a few steps, and returned to pointedly open it a crack before moving off down the hall.

“Oh my god,” Stiles muttered, “as if I don’t sleep with you like, all the time.”

“Say it a little louder, maybe, that definitely won’t give anyone the wrong idea,” Derek grumbled, rubbing his eyes.

Stiles snorted. “Maybe if he didn’t know it was nightmare-slash-sleepwalking watch.”

Derek sat up straighter against the headboard, putting some space between them. “You know I don’t mind,” he said irritably.

Stiles looked down at the book he’d dropped to his lap. “Nothing better to do, right?” Derek frowned at him, trying to pick apart all the conflicting emotions in his voice and scent, but realized with a start that it wasn’t his math book, any more. He must have gotten up for it at some point, and Derek somehow hadn’t noticed. “Ugh, stop. Only you could do adorable and bitchy at the same time. It’s like another superpower,” Stiles said.

Derek looked back at the laptop to see how much of the movie he’d missed, and it was on a completely different one, something Studio Ghibli. Stiles saw the confusion on Derek’s face. “You were conked out, dude, seemed like you needed it,” he said, smiling a little. He didn’t seem to catch how Derek’s breath stopped. “You didn’t miss much, the rest was mostly fighting and—you know what, don’t worry about it, the show was better anyway, I’ll just spoil it for you: the good guys win.” Derek was still stuck on the fact that he’d _slept through it_.

“Least realistic part of the movie,” Derek said. He fought down a yawn and pulled up his knees toward his chest, rested his arms on them. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. He’d been _asleep_.

Stiles jabbed him lightly with an elbow. “Hey, we do okay. We’re still here.”

Derek scoffed. “Since when do I count as a good guy?” He’d slept in this room before, before he got the loft, but not—the house had been empty. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep around his _betas_.

“Oh, no, not you, it was a royal we,” Stiles said, and shifted to eye him balefully over his shoulder. “For a while now, asshole. If you’re just going to be grouchy, go back to sleep.” Changing the movie should have woken him up. Stiles moving. His heartbeat. Stiles _breathing_.

“I should patrol,” he mumbled, and Stiles rolled his eyes but didn’t call him on it, walked him out to lock the door behind him; they shared a look about how weird _that_ was. There was an oddly charged moment where Stiles frowned and seemed like he might say something, but Derek turned and fled, leaving him blinking in the warm light of the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “I can’t protect them” is absolutely meant in the spirit of the buzzfeed video of drunk girls with puppies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JboM-STb4E
> 
> Zenobia and Palmyra are totally real! Any particular shapeshifting powers attributed to historical peoples is purely speculation. Probably. I don't think Teddy Roosevelt was a shifter, but I bet he met some.
> 
> Suggestion box is open for werewolf/supernatural society/magic book titles!


	9. A Visitor

Derek dragged himself out of bed too soon the next morning with a feeling like popcorn stuck in his teeth. Usually he hardly noticed it, but the scent of Stiles was one of the base notes of the loft, stronger than brick dust or raw wood or the persistent mildew around the windows, and he wasn’t sure when that had happened. There were no new texts since their conversation about the likelihood of bunyips in the lake (low; they were huge, territorial, and _Australian_ ). A short workout burned off some of the restless itch, but he skipped yoga, showered, made an omelet, ate it mechanically. He dressed in jeans and a black tee that wouldn’t show blood, just in case. Hesitated, grabbed a jacket, too. Stepping out of the building, he didn’t pick up a scent immediately, but followed the uneasy feeling a few blocks to a familiar coffee shop. _His_ coffee shop. He let himself glare at the sidewalk for a moment, and scrubbed his palm over part of the door frame before he went in. The tables were sparsely populated, so he found her almost immediately. She saw him too, in the usual way at first, but then her eyes went wide and slammed down to the newspaper on the table in front of her. Kelly was working, so he nodded at her for his vanilla cinnamon caramel latte. Someone in front of them in line had ordered it, once, and Stiles stood up from their table and came back to slap another down in front of Derek after he’d stared across the café for ten minutes, stubbornly denying that he wanted one. They didn’t just do artificial flavor shots here; the caramel drizzle was made in a pot on the stove in the back kitchen, like—it was familiar, and he liked it. Braeden and Stiles had almost the exact same little smile when he ordered it, now.

He waited for his drink, leaning by the counter, evaluating the interloper. Straight black hair, faint freckles on coppery brown skin, dressed well but comfortably in a modest blue skirt, simple white shirt under a pale pink cardigan, practical sandals; like a elementary school teacher. Maybe forty, he guessed. Tired enough for it to show. She took a careful sip of her milky tea and filled in an answer for her crossword, nervous but fighting for calm.

When his order was up, he walked over to the table, stood over her, too close, and tapped two fingers on the surface like he was asking for her attention. “Mind if I join you?” he said mildly, and bared his teeth in a way that might look friendly.

She looked up at him, cornered, couldn’t quite smile back, but nodded. Her hands wrapped around the wide ceramic mug. He took a seat across from her, inhaled deeply from his paper cup, took an appreciative sip. She waited.

“So,” he started. “New in town?”

“Yes,” she said, and took a deep breath. “I’d like to be.”

He felt his eyebrows twitch. “Really,” he said, flat.

She raised her chin a few careful degrees, returned his gaze steadily. “I’m looking for something new. A fresh start.” She hesitated. “A safe place.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgement and took another sip, contemplative. “Not many people would look for that in Beacon Hills.” If she hadn’t heard the rumors, she’d at least read the news.

“Well, a lot of places are hiring,” she said. Derek frowned, and she winced. “That was bleak, sorry.” She looked at her tea and back up at him, determined. “But I’ve heard that the leadership here may turn things around. For the area.”

Ah, Derek thought. “Hmm,” he said.

Her eyes narrowed. “There are many kinds of safety,” she snapped. “I’m not afraid of _mountain lions_.” Or if she was, she didn’t want to let it stop her, he read; that was a familiar state with Stiles. “I want a place where my kids can feel like they belong. Like they can… be themselves.” She wavered for a second, but steeled herself again. “It feels right.”

He sat back and leveled a long look at her. Her heartbeat was steady. He could detect the scent of at least one other wolf who must be close to her, a kid, faded like they had been apart a few days. The supernatural grapevine could be formidable, and the promise of a true alpha would draw a lot of wolves seeking protection. But the pack was so small, too few wolves, inexperienced and leaving for college in a year. Scott would never turn anyone away who came here in hope, would never see why he should. Derek’s responsibility to protect everybody from inevitable disaster could stop this here. He thought about how Laura would handle this, stubbornly, fiercely holding to their unbalanced pack of two. He thought about Cora, the picture Boyd had sent last week, her napping half-shifted on a brightly tiled floor with a pudgy cat chewing on her hair. He thought about his little cousins.

Eventually, he nodded, mostly to himself. “Your call is heard,” he said formally. “You can stay a few days for talks. I’m Derek Hale.”

Her eyebrows lifted in surprise, and she nodded respectfully. “Amelia Spencer.” Her eyes raked over him more intently. “Are you—?”

“No,” he interrupted. Maybe all the details weren’t out; small mercies. “Used to be. Lost it healing.” Erica’s and Boyd’s injuries, then Cora poison, too much too fast after whatever Peter had done to claw himself back to life, the alpha power unstable to start with, only rooted weakly in his bones. He twitched a shoulder awkwardly to show he wasn’t bitter. At this point, protocol would be to introduce her to the actual alpha, but Scott had a lacrosse game that night and a history test tomorrow, since he was in the same class as Stiles. “The social structure here is… a little unorthodox. We can have a meeting tomorrow night.” He checked the time on the wall clock by the counter. “There’s someone else you should talk to, though.”

They took her car, an older but well-kept sedan. Derek finished his drink on the way, between quiet directions to the hospital. Scenting the car unobtrusively, he changed his guess to two kids, one human. A few other people, but not as regularly. Something strong had spilled in the back seat a while ago – cardamom, he thought – and it was permeated with the typical road trip smells of French fries and stress.

“Where are you coming from,” he asked.

“Tucson,” she said. “Hernandez pack.” She grimaced. “Or, it was.”

He looked at her sharply. “Hunters?”

“Johnstons,” she confirmed. “However. The old alpha passed her power to a bitten wolf, and her son challenged, turned it into a war. It was bad even before the shooting started.”

He’d have to look into it, maybe talk to Argent.

They parked in the shade of a tree and he led her past the sheriff’s patrol car, into the hospital, avoided the elevator. At the nurse’s station, he looked for someone he knew. “Hey, Lisa.”

She looked up from her paperwork, tiny and chipper, thick black hair tied up in a loose knot of even braids. “Derek!” She smiled brightly. “Haven’t seen you in a while!” Her eyes bounced from him to Amelia and back, curious.

“Ah, yeah,” he said awkwardly, stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jacket. None of the teenagers he associated with had been seriously injured since he got back, was why.

She laughed at him, still sweet. “Don’t worry, I’d spend less time here too, if I could.” He smiled back, easier. “What brings you back to us today?”

“Do you know if Melissa’s around?”

“She just went on break!” Lisa dimpled. “Try the cafeteria.”

“Is…” he trailed off. She winked. “Thanks.” He escaped. Amelia had watched the whole exchange with quiet amusement, but mercifully said nothing. They took the stairs down and bypassed the café to enter the bright, open, sparsely populated dining room. Floor to ceiling windows across two walls looked out into the trees. He spotted the back of Melissa’s wavy dark hair and purple scrubs at a table in the sunlight across from—yep, and he’d seen them come in, it was too late to back out now. At least he got a warning from Lisa. Derek sighed. He tilted his head toward them for Amelia before leading her over. She was nervous again.

“Sheriff, Melissa. Sorry to interrupt.” He nodded in greeting, going for sort of casually respectful. From the Sheriff’s face, he’d missed, and from Amelia's, she'd noticed his impulse to dip his chin and protect his neck.

“Derek,” the Sheriff acknowledged, and at least he didn’t have his hand on his gun, though his tone seemed to imply that was a favor. Derek fervently hoped to avoid any mention of the previous night, at all, ideally forever, so any number of thinly veiled threats seemed fair in return for silence. The Sheriff jerked in his seat after a muffled thump under the table, and he shot Melissa a betrayed look as she smiled sweetly up at Derek and Amelia.

“Is this a social call?” Melissa asked.

“Yes. Mostly.” Derek turned to include Amelia, who was darting glances between him and the Sheriff, covertly balanced to run. “This is Amelia Spencer.”

Sheriff Stilinski stretched out a hand with a polite and slightly apologetic smile, for her. “A pleasure.” She took it, still hesitant, but Sheriff was an elected position, and he had practice at putting people at ease. When he wanted to.

Melissa waved her fork and pushed two plastic chairs in their direction with her foot. “Nice to meet you, Amelia, please join us! Derek, stop looming,” she said, and they did. Derek sat back with one leg over the other, letting out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, hands relaxed, exaggerating for Amelia’s benefit. Maybe not just for her.

“Amelia’s thinking about moving to town,” he started. “She might come talk to the Wildlife Conservancy Club.” Lydia and Stiles set up an official high school club for pack members, so that they could reserve classroom space for meetings and have at least a flimsy excuse for forays into and familiarity with the woods. Derek was registered as a volunteer club advisor.

The humans shared a glance and turned to her more carefully. Amelia’s heart tripped, and she sat very still. “Oh,” Melissa said, her tone approximating casual. “Are you also a rare wildlife specialist?”

Amelia’s mouth dropped open. She looked between the three others at the table in disbelief. Derek nodded at her, encouraging.

“It’s a hobby,” she said faintly.

Derek cleared his throat. “I was hoping that either or both of you would have time to talk to her a little bit about what it’s like to live here. Before she meets the rest of the club.”

“Of course,” the Sheriff said. As they started talking, Melissa met Derek’s eyes and gave the smallest nod. She’d text later about their impressions, whether Amelia was someone they were comfortable having him introduce to their sons.

The Sheriff was addressing her seriously. “Last year was a bad one, as you’ve heard. Between the wildlife attacks and the serial murders, I can’t blame anyone who thinks twice about moving here. For a town our size, these kinds of violent crime rates are unheard of.”

“Something in the water?” Amelia ventured.

Melissa snorted. “Something in the woods,” she said under her breath.

Amelia shot a look at Derek. He shook his head minutely. “Not much out there but some big trees,” he said, waiting to see if she got it. Her face went blank and then—

“A nemeton,” she breathed, “A _grove_ , you have a—” she stopped when she saw their grim faces.

“It was dormant,” Derek told her, “Until very recently.”

She sat back, blinking rapidly. “I see. And you lost your—leadership position, from… health concerns. I see. That must be a story.” Melissa and John were exchanging a look that Derek couldn’t read. “Have there been many other new arrivals?” Amelia asked.

“None that I’ve met,” Melissa said, and Derek could only give an awkward shrug when Amelia looked back to him in surprise. Derek had talked to two other weres seeking audience and practically disemboweled one in the woods, but there hadn’t been anyone he was willing to bring to Scott’s pack, to allow to live in town. Any suspicions about Parrish were just that, suspicions, and he didn’t know about the pack.

“We’re not recruiting heavily. For the club,” Derek said, not meeting anyone’s eyes. It would sound like a reassurance to the Sheriff and Melissa, but it was a warning, too, for Amelia. There were risks to expanding any pack too quickly, but Scott’s wasn’t big enough to easily accommodate new betas, and a small pack in a territory this dangerous would never be stable.

“Well. Something to think about.” Amelia rubbed one her thumbnails with the pad of another finger as it sat in her lap. “Do you think it will be quieter, now?”

The Sheriff looked pained. “We caught all the bad guys,” he reassured her. Derek didn’t contradict him; some had just been killed, too, though Peter had found a way around that. “We have close co-operation between the department, local hunters, and wildlife experts such as yourself. We’ve got a good team together, going forward.”

He only reluctantly gestured to Derek with that, but Derek managed a small smile anyway, and turned to Amelia to explain. “I consult for the department, sometimes. As an expert on local wildlife and the occult.”

She laughed at that, almost silently. “I see.” She flicked her eyes from him to the Sheriff, and back. “That’s a great comfort.” She sat a little easier, and let her shoulders down, looking across the table to the window, watching people behind her in the reflection.

The Sheriff sighed. “We’ve got that one thing going for us, at least.”

“Hey!” Melissa pointed her fork at him and said, mock-reprovingly, “The lacrosse team is alright, too.”

He laughed, but looked proud. “Yeah, they are.”

Derek saw that look and felt like he suddenly understood why Stiles had stayed on the team, despite everything. You couldn’t save the town from evil every week in front of the bleachers.

Amelia seemed incredulous. “Lacrosse? Really?”

“Oh yes,” Melissa confirmed. “Bigger than football.”

“They have different seasons,” the Sheriff grumbled, an old complaint. “I don’t see why we couldn’t have both.”

“Please, as if you’d ever like to see your poor kid out on a football field.” The Sheriff and Derek both winced, and Amelia and Melissa laughed, Melissa brightly, Amelia in her same quiet shake.

“What about the academics?” asked Amelia. “Or other extracurriculars? Is the school system alright?”

“The high school is…” the Sheriff made a face. “Well, the teachers we still have are dedicated,” he said. “But I would recommend staying away from it after dark. There’s also Davenford Prep just in the next county, which is private but has fewer, uh. Incidents.”

“The public school isn’t that bad. There’s a fair number of AP classes, art, music, student newspaper, a computer lab, robotics team,” added Melissa.

“A drama department,” the Sheriff added, and they both snickered. Derek thought it must be an inside joke—the high school plays weren’t that bad these days, from what he overheard in town.

Melissa grinned at Derek and leaned in conspiratorially. “That’s what we used to call Stiles.”

Derek could feel himself start to smile, and he ducked his head to hide it, set a fingernail into a stray scratch on the varnish of the table. “Ah. He would hate that.” When he looked up, Melissa’s eyes were kind, her smile teasing. He cleared his throat and looked away, but Amelia had relaxed almost completely – he could sense her surprised, hidden laughter – so maybe it was—no, fuck, he wasn’t going to blush. Or panic. He sat up straighter instead of sinking lower in his seat.

After a few more minutes of small talk, the Sheriff stood up to go. “I’ve got to get back on patrol,” he said apologetically. “Nice meeting you, Ms. Spencer. Maybe we’ll see you around.” He clapped Derek on the shoulder again, harder than usual, with a tight squeeze at the end that Derek bore stoically. The Sheriff hitched his belt up, nodded to Melissa, and made for the door.

Derek watched her smile after him for a few seconds, then leaned in like she had, feeling maybe the tiniest bit vindictive. “The deputies have started to ticket his cruiser when he parks here, you know.”

“No!” she gasped, elated, and put a hand over her heart earnestly. “ _Thank you_.”

He and Amelia kept her company until she gave up on her salad and headed back upstairs. Amelia made it all the way into her car before she turned to Derek and exclaimed, “They’re both human!”

“They knew my mother,” he said, which was true, though not why he trusted them, and neatly implied that they had been inducted into their secret world a while ago, by a respected alpha, or at least by him, on purpose, instead of last year, on accident, by their teenaged sons. Derek’s family-pack always had human members, but weaker or crazier alphas could and did make demands isolating members to increase their control. Of his own betas, Isaac may have been honestly better off once his dad was killed, Boyd was essentially estranged from his parents, but his aunt, and Erica’s family—he wants to think that they could have been pack, with time. That they would have wanted it, that he would have allowed it, if everything had been different.

But that was a dangerous road for him to walk down.

“Still,” Amelia said. “Human allies, it’s good to see. Human law enforcement? It’s a marvel.” Cops who were aware of the supernatural were almost always hunters, like the state detective who had come up from LA last year. Amelia put the car in gear and headed back toward the center of town.

“The Sheriff is a good man,” Derek said. “The rest of the department,” he held his hand in an equivocating gesture, “Some are okay. Some aren’t. No hunters, though. They’ve seen enough to be cautious, but nobody carries wolfsbane.” He grimaced. “Speaking of. If you see an older wolf who introduces himself as Peter, that’s my uncle, he’s an omega. He won’t harm you, but he’s… unpredictable. Since the fire.”

“Grief-mad?” she asked, ready to be understanding. It happened, when people lost their packs, their anchors. They went feral, wild, torn from their humanity.

“Maybe.” Derek stared out the windshield. No one could deny that Peter had been insane, but it was cold, calculating anger. Crazy like a serial killer, which, by the way, he is, Stiles had said. “Maybe not. He killed my sister to be the alpha. I took it from him.” That made it sound so much less messy than it had been. He tried not to remember the overwhelming smell of burning hair and meat and chemicals, the crackle of blackened skin and the fleshy give of his throat, the awful twisted rush of red that made it feel like Derek had caught fire too. Now that spark of power that his mother, and her aunt, and so many generations of his family had carried was gone forever, ended with him. He wasn’t sorry to not be an alpha any more, but he was sorry for that, for losing yet another piece of the people he’d loved, that instead of safeguarding the guttering flame until it could clear, he’d burnt it out.

Amelia studied him, in short glances away from the road. “I heard that most of the people who died in the ‘animal attacks’ last spring were connected to the fire,” she said. “But I have to say I’m surprised a true alpha would let a wolf like that stay here.”

“That’s—” Derek shook his head. “That’s how he is. Always wants to believe the best of people, even when he’s seen their worst.” It still might be willful naivete and pure dumb luck, honestly. It wasn’t just Peter, either; there was no world where Scott didn’t forgive Allison anything short of actual murder. Letting Deucalion and the twins live might still come back to bite them. Maybe not. They’d find out eventually. “I’m sure he’ll answer any questions you have tomorrow evening. I’ll take your phone number, and you can drop me back at Da’at Bean.”

She nodded, pensive. “I’m meeting with a real estate agent tomorrow,” she said.

“That sounds fine,” he replied. “No restrictions for public space in town limits. Stay out of the woods. There’s another pack to the southwest, in the lower valley.” She should know that, but it was important not to annoy them, even if he didn’t agree with all their beliefs. He drummed his fingernails on his leg, then sighed, and gave in to the debate he’d been having with himself. “Did you talk to Alpha Ito?” he asked. “Her pack is larger and more established, and Hill Valley has been… more settled. Safe.”

Amelia pursed her lips. “I did,” she said slowly, “but I found that we had philosophical differences.” She was holding something back.

“No interest in being Buddhist?” he asked neutrally.

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe that all shifters are monsters, and I have no interest in converting to another religion.” Derek saw her hand subtly flex on the worn leather of the steering wheel. “I’d like to raise my children Muslim.”

He let himself grin. “Satomi’s pack is kind of a cult, isn’t it,” he said, and she laughed. “The pack here is more used to Christian and Jewish traditions, so you might get too many questions, but they’d mean well.”

“That’s as much as I’d hoped for, honestly.” She frowned a little. “Nobody follows the moons?”

“My family did,” he said, and she didn’t press. He cleared his throat. “One last warning. The pack leadership is going to be younger than you’re expecting.”

She smiled at the road. “I thought you were young to be acting as Second, but I’ve been impressed so far.”

He was grateful again that the Sheriff and Melissa had been willing to help. It felt like stretching stiff muscles just to talk as much as he had, let alone to a stranger. She pulled the sedan up to the curb, but seemed to be having a debate of her own. He waited.

“You haven’t asked me if I was born or bitten,” she said frankly.

That was not what he was expecting. “Do you need help with control?” It didn’t seem like it, but it was weeks from the full moon.

“No, I—no.”

“Seems personal, then. Does it matter?”

Like he’d seen a few times before, there was a shadow just under the surface of her expression. After a minute of searching his face, her lips quirked up. “I suppose not.”

He reached out carefully, projecting his movements, and placed his palm against the top of her hand on the steering wheel. He brushed down her wrist, moving the sleeve of her cardigan. She stared, thunderstruck; he’d as good as vouched for her to any wolf she’d meet. He got out of the car at looked back at her through the open window. “I’ll call about tomorrow.”

“Wait,” she said, and bit her lip. “If you count Alpha Ito an ally, you might want to… reach out. I think. Hill Valley has been having its own problems.”

They hadn’t tried to contact Scott, was his first thought, but then, even if Satomi knew Scott was the alpha now, she might not. For, honestly, understandable reasons, not the least being pride. “Maybe I’ll bring her some tea,” he finally said, meaning he wouldn’t give them any cause to resent her for bringing their weakness to another pack, and she gave him a quick smile.

Derek watched her drive away, tapped his phone against his palm thoughtfully, and went across the street to claim a bench in the park.

This was worth a mass text to Scott, Stiles, Lydia, and Isaac. _We need to have a short meeting sometime today and a long one tomorrow, probably at the loft_ , he sent.

 _b4 lax gme?_ Scott sent back a few minutes later. Stiles insisted that was how he always typed, but Derek was almost sure it was just to annoy him.

 _Fine_ , he replied. Lydia was probably planning to go anyway.

 _Is anyone bleeding?_ asked Stiles.

_No. We have a visitor. She may petition to join the pack._

_Does that mean that there’s supposed to be an official interview process?_ from Lydia.

 _Why wd nyone move TO here_ , wondered Isaac

_That’s tomorrow. You all need to meet her and vice versa._

There was a chorus of assent, and then a lone text from Stiles, just to him. _You better clean up the loft, make a good impression. Are you ever going to fix that hole in the wall?_

 _The exposed brick arch? I may knock out another one._ He should clean though, shit.

_That’s so – what’s the term? Deshabiye._

Derek closed his eyes in almost physical pain. _No. Pay attention in class, Stiles_

_w/e it’s comp sci, I’m two weeks ahead_

_Don’t get more detention playing minesweeper, at least_.

Begrudgingly, he sent a message to Chris Argent. In the interest of continued peace. _New friendly in town. Amelia Spencer from Tucson. Beige Jetta_. It would be safer for her, too, in case they crossed paths.

Another text from Stiles had come in as he finished. _I probably won’t play anyway. The newbies this year are obnoxiously good._

 _They’re all human, right?_ Derek assumed they’d been careful about it, but he had to ask.

 _Yeah, I blocked the locker room door with mt ash at the beginning of the season_. At least they’d progressed beyond Scott tackling people to sniff them.

 _Then you still have a shot. You are skilled_ , Derek reassured. _We exhort you_.

 _That should be my line_ , Stiles sent back. _If anyone’s Owen here, it’s me_ , followed by a baseball, eyes, and prayer hands.

Derek laughed, immediately felt like an idiot, and surreptitiously looked around to see if anyone noticed. A woman wearing yoga pants and carrying a smoothie was staring at him with a pinched expression from across the street, a block away. He sighed. _Keep your helmet on, then_ , he sent, and got back a winking kissy face. He rolled his eyes, deliberately closed the conversation, cleared his message history, and looked up at the sky for a few minutes, before walking back toward the loft. To clean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Art of Fielding reference at the end there! It seems like something they would both read.
> 
> Kelly is a nod to chaya’s very cute mcu barbershop quartet fic barista :) http://archiveofourown.org/works/4361948


	10. b4 lax gme

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the kids! At least Derek has a good excuse for lurking around the high school this time.

After school was out, he found Scott and Isaac first, already in maroon jerseys and leaning against the outside brick, near the door closest to the locker rooms.

“Hey, Derek!” Scott waved.

Derek nodded to them both and looked around for Stiles and Lydia. There were idiots yelling down the hallway inside, but he could just about pick out—

“It’s just different, okay? We’re already—don’t give me that face,” Stiles was saying, and Lydia made a rude noise but—

“They’re coming,” Isaac said, then smirked. “Stiles got detention for texting in class.” Derek shot him a warning look. He’d been uncharacteristically merciful the day in the woods, but Derek didn’t have much hope it would hold. Scott was distracted, though, sniffing the air in the least subtle way imaginable.

“Why are you lemony?” Scott asked.

“You cleaned?” Isaac asked, unfairly incredulous, Derek thought.

“Yes.” Derek refused to be embarrassed. “I needed to anyway,” he grumbled.

“How did you find her? Or did she find you?” asked Isaac.

“She was in my coffee shop. You might be able to feel her presence, too, like an itch.” Scott looked skeptical, and Isaac was definitely about to say something Derek would regret when the door opened.

Stiles bounced off it on the way out, in uniform, Lydia gliding sedately behind him. Derek smiled a little. “Sourwolf!” Stiles grinned, though it seemed forced, and he was very deliberately avoiding looking at Lydia. Derek rolled his eyes, mostly for show. “So. Dish. What’s she like?”

Derek wasn’t sure how to read his tone, so he elected to take the question at face value and shrugged. “She seems sweet. Brave. Running from something, but I don’t get the feeling it’s something she did. She’s looking for a home, wants to build a life.” He balled his hands in his pockets.

“Are you sure? It’s just, you know.” Scott said, and gestured at Derek like that was supposed to mean something. Stiles punched Scott in the shoulder, and Scott made a face at him. Derek crossed his arms across his chest.

“Do I,” he said, flat.

Lydia sighed, pulled out her phone, and started a text.

“Yeah, you know, it’s like you never trust anybody except—”

“I _also_ asked Chris Argent to run a background check,” Derek broke in. He basically had. He’d given Chris information that would make him feel like he needed to. He made eye contact with Isaac, who shrugged a little, awkwardly, so Derek gave him a tiny nod in thanks.

Scott was not appeased, and continued sniffing obnoxiously. “What were you doing at the hospital?”

“I brought Amelia to talk to your mom. The Sheriff was there, too,” he said, the last part directed at Stiles, who stiffened, and Scott’s eyes actually flashed red.

Derek looked back and forth between them, thrown. Was there something he missed? She’d been so—the cardamom could have masked—no. No. That’s not what this was. He felt his own anger spark. “It was _broad daylight_ , I was _right there_ , the Sheriff was _armed_. They were _safe_.”

“She’s a total stranger!” Stiles was angry at him, and hurt, which was worse.

“As if he’d pull in anyone off the street, honestly,” Lydia said, sounding bored, and Stiles’s betrayed look switched to her. After another quick glance between her and Derek, he screwed up his face, let out a breath, scraped his hand through his hair, and nodded, still unhappy, but understanding.

Scott was another story. “You shouldn’t have exposed them,” he said stubbornly.

“I know you don’t trust my judgement, but at least trust theirs,” Derek ground out. He stood by his decision. The Sheriff and Melissa were good parents, and, yes, better at people than he was. “If they had _any_ doubt, she’d be gone, or I’d be burying a body in the woods right now.”

“You always have to leave murder as an option, don’t you,” Scott snapped.

Derek threw up his arms. “You _just_ accused me of not protecting them _enough_. What are you even angry at right now, Scott?”

“ _You_ ,” he snarled, eyes red, but Isaac reached out and rested a hand on his shoulder. Scott almost seemed like he would turn on him instead, but stopped, shook his head, seemed to come back to himself. Everybody stood for a few seconds, breathing. “Sorry,” Scott said, something like ashamed. “Sorry. I’m just. I don’t know.” He looked over his shoulder, but there was nobody there.

“You’re an alpha now, Scott, you have to know your territory. That instinct isn’t going to just go away,” Derek said, too shortly, and Scott closed off again. Derek looked to the sky for patience, and to Isaac for an explanation, but Isaac actually put his hands up and shook his head, so. Whatever. “Amelia is a peaceful beta, not feral or violent. She came in the open with clear intent and petition,” Derek explained. _Patiently_. “I just agreed to introduce her to the alpha. You can tell her to fuck off.”

“She would have to abide by that?” Lydia asked.

“Yes. Well, okay.” He rubbed a hand on his face, “She _could_ choose to move here and become an omega who’s pissed off the head of the territory, but that would be _idiotic_ and incredibly dangerous for her kids. Even the twins left when you wouldn’t accept them.”

“She has kids?” Stiles was still radiating quiet suspicion, but his curiosity was kicking in, too.

“She already wants to move to the murder capital of the U. S.,” Isaac pointed out.

“Yes, she has kids. Not with her now.” Derek grit his teeth. “You have to understand. The kind of violence we’ve faced won’t deter all wolves from coming here. Some will come because of it, and those are dangerous. But a true alpha is…” he grasped for words. “It’s supposed to be a sign of hope, almost like a King Arthur figure. A righteous leader.” He looked at Scott, sad now. “People will want to believe in something better. Don’t let a stupid tree take that away from you.”

“Maybe we should tell her not to move here, for her own sake,” Stiles said, not looking at anyone.

Derek’s chest was tight. "You can reject her for any reason,” he said. “You don’t even have to meet.” It would be rude, but that was their prerogative.

“We should meet,” Lydia decided. “It would be nice to know at least one adult werewolf who probably hasn’t murdered anybody.”

Derek looked at Scott. Scott looked at the others. Stiles nodded reluctantly, and Isaac shrugged.

“Okay,” Scott said.

“Okay. Is everyone fine with the loft?” Derek checked. “I’ll get dinner. Takeout.”

“Straight from the boxes, or do you have more than four plates?” Stiles asked skeptically.

“I have plates.” Stiles and Isaac gave him the same look. He sighed. “I’ll get more plates.”

“Well, I suppose we should keep her expectations realistic,” Lydia said.

Other Beacon Hills lacrosse players started wandering past them out to the field.

“I’ll tell her to meet at, what, seven?” That got nods all around, except from Scott, who was back to almost glaring at him. “Show up before then, by six if you can.” That should get everyone there by 6:30.

Coach Finstock blew his whistle from the field. The three boys on the team startled and looked over guiltily.

“Go,” Derek said, then grimaced at himself. “Good luck out there,” he amended awkwardly. Scott frowned at him, but turned his back and walked away; Isaac followed. Stiles patted him on the chest, for his effort, and set out toward the field. Derek let his shoulders slump. He turned toward Lydia and held his arm out to escort her to the bleachers as she tucked away her phone.

“You’re staying?” she asked. When he nodded warily, she took his arm and smiled. “Lovely. Let’s catch up,” she threatened. Her nails dug in. He suppressed a sigh. They took seats on the bleachers, near the top and to one side, which Derek appreciated. Primo lurking spot, as Stiles would say.

“So. Before Allison gets here,” Lydia even whispered with precise enunciation, almost under her breath for privacy from the other wolves. “This evil tree is driving all my friends insane,” she hissed.

He quirked an eyebrow.

She huffed and tossed a wave of strawberry blonde hair over her shoulder, securing her armor. “Me too, I suppose, but nothing new.”

 “Is Scott always like that?” he probed.

She bit her lip. “Not that bad.” Her eyes flicked to him and away. Derek sighed. Yeah, okay, he probably wasn’t helping. “The three of them died and came back to life. Evidently there are consequences. ‘A shadow on their hearts’ and psychic haunting by a _stump_.”

“Stiles thinks Deaton knows what’s happening, but doesn’t know how to stop it. They were only supposed to be out for a few seconds; _something_ went wrong.”

She hummed in agreement. “Did you and Stiles talk to him about it yesterday? He missed a review for the calculus test, by the way.”

Derek rubbed the back of his neck. “Shit. He didn’t say anything.” Derek hadn’t exactly given him a chance to, though. “No, that was—He tripped and activated a magic thing on Monday, and I found it yesterday. Deaton said it’s not dangerous.”

“He _tripped_ and—” Lydia rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I hate this town.” He patted her hand consolingly, and she smacked him on the shoulder. Her responses to teasing were still less violent than Cora’s.

“I asked another druid about the stump, actually,” he told her. Frankie had thrown his head back in a cackle too big for his body when Derek had asked if he could call or send a letter, told him he might be eighty but knew how to use email. “He said that what we’ve seen is very strange for a nemeton. And—the applicant. Amelia. She wasn’t scared, at first, at all.”

“It would be so typical if even our evil tree stump were _extra_ weird,” Lydia muttered.

“That’s just it,” Derek said. “He says the tree shouldn’t be evil at all. It’s supposed to be a neutral source of protection and power. He thinks that something must have corrupted it.”

“Like, oh, I don’t know, twelve human sacrifices?” Sometimes it was hard to imagine she and Stiles had ever not been friends.

“No, actually.” That worried her, which he thought was warranted: it meant that either the effect of twelve people dying was not necessarily evil, or the actual corrupting power was much worse. “Or, not alone. I think something happened before we were born. Frankie was sure there must be a mistake when I said it was a stump; he said cutting down a nemeton would be unconscionable. Whoever did it must have had a reason. My mother or great-aunt must have known.”

“Frankie.” That _would_ be what she latched onto first.

“He’s—” There was absolutely no way he could tell her that Frankie ran a roasted nut slash Italian ice stand in Prospect Park. “He’s very well respected in the New York supernatural community.”

“How much do you trust him?” she asked bluntly.

“Laura did.” She’d talked to him, anyway, which was rare enough. “A lot of people went to him for advice. Not just werewolves, either.”

Lydia went quiet to think. “If it’s true that the tree was corrupted, it would give us a new angle. We haven’t been able to figure out how to work against the nemeton itself.” She made a face to communicate how much she resented being antagonized by a plant. “If we can treat the evil part as a contaminate, perhaps we’ll make more progress.”

“Maybe,” Derek said. “It doesn’t seem… likely.”

“Not likely, perhaps, but we only need possible,” she said, with steel in her voice. “Allison and I are still working on her great-great aunt’s journals, but there’s a lot in them, with no focus or catalogue, and they’re fragile. We haven’t found anything useful.”

“I have a few more things that need to be translated,” Derek said. He was building a network of contacts, slowly, and a collection of eBay alerts. “I don’t know if they’ll be any better, but you could help look through them, if you need a break from faded penmanship and bloodstains.”

“Don’t even pretend you can promise me books without bloodstains,” she said. “Is there more Archaic or Medieval Latin?” She studied her nails, but didn’t otherwise hide her interest.

“If only,” he said. “Old Irish, with a Middle English partial translation, half a book on trees which might just be gardening. There’s also a Hebrew account of a haunted woods – I gave that one to Stiles – and a Chinese record of an Old Arabic story of a cursed valley that sounded promising. I’m still trying to get a full copy of that, but I have some pages.”

She gave him an unimpressed look. “I’m still not going to learn Chinese.”

“The records are consistent for fifteen hundred years.”

“For my _copious_ free time.”

This iteration of the argument, though, he was armed with another counterpoint: “There’s a Chinese language AP test.”

She sniffed derisively. “I’m sure that’s modern logograms, not the traditional script for records, and the speaking and listening sections would be Mandarin, but you only know Cantonese,” she said, like all those points weren’t winning his argument for him. Her interest in language evolution was what made her start learning Archaic Latin in the first place. “Hmm,” she said, after a brief pause, and he turned his head toward the parking lot to hide a smile. It fell when he saw a girl with dark hair walking in their direction in low-heeled boots, tights under shorts, and a loose top good for hiding a thin weapon harness. “Allison’s here,” he said. He tried not to sound dismayed.

Lydia gave him a look that said he’d failed. The bleachers were starting to fill, so there wasn’t a clear path; instead, the hunter vaulted gracefully up the bleachers from the ground to sit beside Lydia, who greeted her warmly.

Allison subtly scanned the crowd and woods, then turned to Derek, eyes tight. “My dad says Amelia seems clear,” she said. Derek clenched his jaw, but couldn’t be surprised that Chris had told her. Maybe Scott had, too. “She’s staying at the Holiday Inn. Diagnosed with a rare cancer and miraculously cured when she was young, probably turned then. Her pack is having some kind of succession war.” He nodded sharply. That fit. “Two kids, four and eight, youngest is probably a wolf. Restraining order still on file against an ex. You’ll get a secure message with details.”

She studied him across Lydia while he glared at the field. It was more than he thought they would tell him, more than he had expected them to be able to find. More than he wanted to know. Being aware that there was a pervasive hunter network keeping and sharing information about all of them was one thing, but seeing first-hand how efficiently insidious it was made him want to kill something. All the paranoia he and Laura ever had was warranted – the strict use of only cash or bonds, the fake names, the year and just running, the deal with Jó – but also useless, never enough. It meant Kate _could_ have found them, if she had tried. Even innocent people had no hope of escaping that kind of reach, of living a life without fear. “Should I be there tomorrow?” Allison asked.

“Absolutely not,” he snapped. Lydia jabbed him with an elbow. Allison looked a little hurt, when he looked over, and makeup didn’t quite cover the dark circles under her eyes. “If she moves here, you’ll need to meet her as part of the pack, but you’re still an Argent. You can’t demand that kind of trust at a first introduction.” She accepted it with a stilted nod and resumed her scan.

Lydia suddenly started clapping, drawing Derek’s attention back to the field. The teams had run around warming up, made huddles, broken out, and scattered to stand on the field with purpose. He’d missed the faceoff, but now Isaac had the ball, passed to Scott; Stiles was… on the bench. Derek looked around the bleachers, but didn’t see the Sheriff or Melissa. An opposing player picked up a blocked shot, a Beacon Hills player made them fumble it, another maroon jersey found the ball. Something about them made Derek’s focus catch. They cradled, shot, scored, to loud cheering. Fast, but not graceful or particularly strong. They held the crosse like a katana, but that by itself wasn’t damning. He squinted.

“Who’s number fifteen?” he asked Lydia.

“Hm? New girl, Kira Yukimura,” she said. Derek frowned a little bit, searching his memory, and then he shut his eyes and sighed. “She’s good. Her dad is the latest history teacher,” Lydia went on, and threw a sly look at Allison. “Kira’s very enamored of Scott.” Allison pouted at her. Lydia raised her eyebrows imperiously, then turned back to Derek. “Why?”

“ _That’s_ Kira,” he said.

Lydia narrowed her eyes. “Yes.”

“She’s been in school for _months_.”

“And I reiterate, now more emphatically: why?”

“Scott and Isaac are both oblivious idiots,” he said wearily. He very obviously eyed the crowd that had edged in around them, “She’s really something.” He saw Allison’s hand creep toward the dagger sheath under her shirt.

“She’s _what_.” Lydia said, though she lowered her voice, at least, and tapped Allison’s elbow.

“Is she dangerous?” Allison whispered, cold.

He bristled. “Not worth _stabbing_ at a lacrosse game,” he said, low and, he thought, reasonably. He glanced at Lydia. “Can I borrow your sunglasses?” It was cloudy, but she’d still have some in her purse. She handed them over, curious. He put them on, let his eyes slip to blue, and saw it immediately, like a brilliant shroud.

“I came across an interesting legend the other day, from Japan,” he said, even as he could, like it was an idle change in topic. “Kitsune. Elemental fox spirits, tricksters.” He’d met another one, once, when he was little. Another Yukimura, which seemed like too much of a coincidence. She’d shown him her aura, an incandescent fox-faced overlay, powerful, with many tails, and his mother had laughed and accused her of showing off. “They can live for a thousand years.” After a brief look around for anything else, he handed back her sunglasses, and she put them away with precise, delicate movements.

Allison was typing on her phone, either making notes or texting her dad.

Lydia widened hey eyes just a touch. “Can you imagine going to high school with someone a thousand years old,” she said like it was idle speculation.

“I don’t think anyone who made it through high school once would voluntarily go back,” he said.

“And yet, here _you_ are,” she said airily.

He winced a little. Laura made him get a GED, so no, not really. “Not in class,” he reassured. With so little control over her aura and no tails, Kira had to be as young as she looked, might not even be fully manifested.

Lydia hummed. “So. Are you doing anything fun after the game?” she said, like it was a change in topic.

He sighed and sat back. He felt like smacking a true alpha on the back of the head, but realistically, he should introduce himself to Kira and see if her parents were around, and that would have to be enough for now. “Not with guests in town. Some more reading. Might go out later this week, meet some new people.” He thought for a little bit, following the action on the field. “Do you think Kira would be interested in joining the Wildlife Conservancy Club?”

“I don’t think she has much experience in the woods,” Lydia said skeptically, “and we’re interviewing another member tomorrow.”

“It sounds like she’s already following Scott,” Derek said, “The only question is whether you trust her.”

“She eats lunch with us, but she still seems lonely. It sucks to be the new girl,” Allison said.  

Lydia frowned at her. “We were friends on your first day!”

Allison smiled at her, dimples and all, for the first time since she sat down. “I was lucky here,” she said, and put her hand on Lydia’s knee.

“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Lydia sniffed, “You know I have impeccable taste.” They leaned into each other, and Derek looked away. “It sucks to feel like the last to know,” she admitted, and Allison squeezed her hand in apology.

A few minutes later, he was leaning forward, and Lydia poked him in the thigh with a fingernail. “I think Stiles is falling asleep,” he said.

“Ugh. Really?” She pursed her lips. “Let’s hope he doesn’t wake up screaming.”

“He’s been doing okay with it, this week,” Derek said. Lydia turned fully toward him with a sharp look, but Derek studiously ignored her, and she eventually picked up a conversation with Allison. He tuned out the echoing metallic steps and scrapes of the bleachers themselves, the yelling, the cheers, and let his attention wander through the stands, found a few quiet conversations. Someone was planning a party, someone’s family was moving to Forrest Park when the school year was over, the Historical Society was fundraising for a new expansion. Something about a TV show he didn’t watch, sports he didn’t care about, some very hushed gossip, reassuringly normal. Something about creamer cups going missing that was… probably fine. A rumor from Hill Valley; Derek mentally adjusted the importance of talking to Satomi.

He filtered through heartbeats, touched on Lydia’s, Allison’s, until he could find the one that bumped along in a way unique to Stiles, slumped on the bench below and leaning against his stick, helmet propped under his arm. Not quite asleep, but dozing. Should be safe. He looked down by his feet. There were oak trees near the field, branches overhanging this end of the bleachers, and he selected a round green acorn, not too big. With a subtle flick, he sent it sailing up in a gentle arc over the people between them and down to crack off the hard plastic of Stiles’s helmet. The vibration startled him as much as the sound, and as he flailed awake he managed to send his stick, helmet, and gloves all flying. The rest of the bench barely spared him a glance, clearly used to it. Derek fought down a smile. Stiles looked back at him with some sixth sense, and his eyes widened and then narrowed as he caught Derek’s face. He turned around very deliberately and reached up to pretend to scratch the back of his head with one extended middle finger.

Derek let his teeth show as Stiles settled in more warily, peeking over his shoulder. He had three more acorns.

He belatedly noticed Lydia staring like he was a particularly bizarre undocumented life form while Allison frowned at the field. He raised his eyebrows at her, but his ears felt hot. Lydia shook her head slowly, without breaking eye contact.

“Subtle as a bird of paradise,” she chided. Derek rolled his eyes and went back to watching the game. Scott and Isaac had been getting steadily less terrible at hiding their wolf strength and speed, and number nine was pretty good, for a human.

Beacon Hills was ahead five points at the half, and Stiles got to play in the third quarter. When the game was over, he introduced himself to Kira as a friend of Stiles and Lydia. She did seem nice.


	11. A Talk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The sheriff's back! Tiny warning in the end notes.

Stiles felt only a little bit terrible for being glad his dad was called in to the station before the game, since otherwise he thought maybe Derek wouldn’t have stayed, and he was glad he wasn’t home for dinner either, because that meant he could soften him up with junk food and hope that minor crimes would distract him from the full third degree. It started out okay; his dad was sorry he missed seeing him play, and was okay with him doing pack stuff tomorrow, and wanted to know what his recent detentions had been for, which _used_ to be the worst thing they would talk about. He hadn’t brought up the books in the safe or—anything else super awkward and they were almost done with their burgers so maybe he…forgot? But no, he should have known better.

“So.” His dad sat back and started cleaning his fingers with a napkin, and Stiles’s heart sank. “That night at the Jungle—”

“Bisexual, Dad. Two, both. Or any and all, unconstrained by gender binary. I’m not gay, but I am bi.” So, okay, he’d meant for them to have that conversation at some point anyway, maybe this was it. A corner of a wrapper tore free, and he started ripping it into smaller and smaller pieces. He was pretty sure his dad would be fine with it. Probably.

“Which means you’re attracted to—”

“—Girls and guys, yeah—”

“—Derek Hale.”

“What!” He screeched. “No! How—he’s—why would—” his dad just watched him patiently. Stiles threw up his hands. “Yes! Oh my god, have you seen him? _Obviously_ yes.”

John tilted his head a little and squinted at his son. “Sounds serious,” he said placidly, and ate some fries. He had seen Derek Hale, and more to the point, very recently, he’d seen him look at Stiles. So. Despite how much he appreciated the show of faith from Derek – and, okay, bravery – in bringing Ms. Spencer to meet him and Melissa that morning, John had… he’d call them concerns.

“No, he doesn’t—he wouldn’t, we’re. Friends,” Stiles said. And they were, he thought mutinously. Friends texted. He and Derek texted. They were friendly, as much as Derek could be described as friendly; they _got_ each other. That was—that was _important_. And if sometimes, maybe, he felt like—what did it matter? He had a very active imagination. And he was a teenager, he noticed attractive people, boners were only natural with, you know, prolonged physical contact; maybe sometimes he jerked off thinking about attractive people, especially with his face buried in a pillow that smelled like they did – maybe that was _deeply_ embarrassing, but they smelled really fucking good, okay – and even if two people could like, depend on each other when shit happened, generally, and they, you know, hung out, kind of research bros, and it turned out that actually both parties happened to be into dudes – despite one dude not specifically _telling_ the other until a casual sidebar in a conversation with a mutual acquaintance about his stupid ex who maybe dumped him for a hipster couple—anyway, there wasn’t necessarily like, relationship potential. Acorns were not a declaration of intent.

Intent to annoy him, maybe.

 _Into the next life_.

He squashed that heartbreak waiting to happen back into a lockbox in the corner of his mind. Again. Get hot in college, he reminded himself. Therapy for everyone. Triumphant homecoming. Wow and woo. That was the plan. The… very secret plan.

“Good, because anything else would be _illegal_ since you’re still _seventeen_ ,” The Sheriff emphasized by stabbing a fry in his direction. “I think I’ve been pretty understanding about you being friends with a—a guy who’s twenty-three, since he’s helped with all this…” his dad waved a hand in a way that meant “supernatural crap,” and his face was pinched like it always was when he had to think about werewolves, and Stiles abruptly realized that he might have downplayed the direct imminent danger of the past year so much that his dad might not realize Derek was the only reason he and Scott were _alive_. “But if your relationship was _romantic_ , it would be a different conversation.”

“Dad!” Stiles felt his cheeks flame. “ _Romantic_ , really, I can’t believe you—how could you think—even if he wanted to – which he doesn’t! – it would be the—no. You know what? No.” Stiles crossed his arms and glared at the ceiling. John didn’t take very long to figure out why that set of mannerisms was familiar. It didn’t make him happy.

“Deborah Walters says she sees you two at the diner all the time,” he said, a potentially leading statement, but not an accusation. Yet. Roscoe was easily one of the most recognizable vehicles in town, and point of fact, many people thought, correctly, that the Sheriff might appreciate hearing where they spotted it. Where, and when, and with who.

Stiles glared at the wall like he could see her from the office. “ _Debbie_ ,” he muttered like a curse. “Okay, I guess, I mean, sometimes. We get takeout. Once in a while. Occasionally. He reminds me to eat, and—he does the same thing for Isaac, for his p—people he’s friends with. Like me. Because we’re friends. We go to—he likes the burgers _and_ the shakes at Dewey’s better, which, frankly, it’s embarrassing how wrong he is, but he’s got bizarrely strong opinions about pickles, so we go there half the time even though he _agrees_ the fries at Foster’s are—” John’s eyebrows were climbing, and Stiles belatedly cut himself off.

Ah, hell, John thought. “Just takeout?” he asked sharply, “Any reason he doesn’t want to sit with you in a well-lit public space?” Not that he particularly _wanted_ them to be seen together, but then at least someone could keep an eye on them.

Stiles went still for a second, worrying in and of itself, and his jaw set. “In this town? Yes. There is,” Stiles said. “It’s the same reason he only gets groceries at three in the morning or at the farmer’s market half an hour away. ‘That poor Hale boy, you remember his family,’ ‘Oh, but I heard he’s a hitman in a cult selling drugs now, so sad.’ He has hypervigilance and _werewolf hearing_ and knows _exactly_ what people say behind his back.” Stiles knew how that felt. The hospital corridors carried sound pretty well, and when he was ten, he was as good – arguably better – at being places people didn’t expect him to be.

John winced, he couldn’t help it; he’d heard some of the rumors, even from his deputies, and he was sure those weren’t the worst. He remembered the Hales, of course, raven-haired and a little uncanny, everybody did, and you couldn’t think of them without remembering the fire. But he’d seen other good kids turned desperate and resentful by tragedy, and Derek had been a person of interest _twice_ , legitimately involved in violent dealings even though he was exonerated of any wrongdoing. So, the station got calls about a certain black Camaro around town, and sometimes when Derek went jogging. Or sat and read in the park. Or— “Okay, it’s not fair, but you know how it looks—”

“—Dad, _really_? You can’t be—”

“—He doesn’t exactly make an effort to—”

“—He would sit in a booth and stay for dessert out of self-flagellation and _spite_ , if it were just about him, but _I_ don’t want to watch him glare at the table and wonder if I should slash tires in the parking lot. So. We get takeout.”

“Slash _tires_?” John was the _sheriff_.

“Exaggeration,” Stiles said, “ha ha,” but his eyes slid to the side. John knew—he knew his kid had a good heart, yeah, but he would be careful about security cameras. _Hell_.

“Didn’t he date your crazy English teacher?” That was the last shot he had, since Stiles knew exactly how spurious Scott's accusations against Derek had been, and John wasn’t sure any more if he was trying to talk Stiles out of his crush or—or what.

“That—” Stiles looked torn, still fiercely defensive, but kind of sick. John felt a familiar drop in his gut that meant he might not like knowing the answer. “It wasn’t—” Stiles clenched his jaw, came to a decision, and rushed out, “It wasn’t consensual, there was mind control magic, you _can’t_ say anything, she’s _dead_ and he doesn’t want anyone to know.”

John sighed heavily and put his elbows on the desk, sagged in his seat, feeling suddenly ten years older. He pushed his fries away, stomach sour. “Jesus.” He rubbed a hand over his face, his mouth, as if he could wipe out the memory of that horrifying kiss. As if he could forget how he’d felt, even knowing what she was, what she’d done, how for one awful moment he’d thought he wanted to kiss back. How until just before her body had shown up with the throat ripped out, the glamour gone, there was a nudge in his mind that said he wanted to see her again. Of all the horrifying things he’d learned were possible, that kind of control might be the worst. He shook his head. “Jesus. Alright. I won’t be too hard on him.”

“I don’t know why you would think you had any reason to be,” Stiles said, scowling, eyes downcast. He didn’t even go for the rest of the fries.

“It doesn’t give him any excuse to take advantage of you, you know that, right?” John said gently. That was what really mattered, after all. "No matter what’s happened to him, never let him do anything you don’t want.”

“Oh my god, Dad,” Stiles muttered, red as a tomato, rubbing his face with the back of one hand. “It’s not an issue, believe me. As if there’s any—He’s really not interested.”

John decided that if Stiles didn’t see it and Derek had sense enough to keep it to himself, he wasn’t going to be the one to let that cat out the bag. Or werewolf, as the case may be. Were there werecats? God, he hoped not. Jesus, Derek Hale. An older _werewolf_ in tight jeans and a leather jacket was not what any parent wanted for their one and only. He sighed. “You’re a catch, son. Someone amazing is going to see that eventually,” he said, a middle ground. Melissa was going to laugh herself sick the next time they talked.

“You know it,” Stiles said with a self-deprecating half-smile, but Deputy Haigh opened the door looking grim for his update from the team they'd sent to help out in Hill Valley, and the Sheriff made Stiles pack up and go home for the night.

Back in his room, Stiles stared at his homework for a few hours, read some more about natural/supernatural/artificial energy conduction, and periodically checked the corner of his laptop screen, where the bright dots of the GPS tracker were mostly steady: his dad at the station, Lydia at Allison’s, Isaac with Scott at the clinic. Scott was probably working late, but maybe doing homework; he’d been staying there more often, recently, especially when Melissa was at work, which she was. There was one lone dot circling through the woods, pacing around the Holiday Inn.

 _Window’s open if you get bored_ , he texted. The green dot stopped for a minute, set out again, stopped.

 _Can’t stay long, but I could eat,_ Derek sent back. _You want anything from Happy Garden?_

_Crab rangoons_

_No._

_Say hi to Mrs. Zhang for me_

_Also no._

So Derek brought him potstickers, which was what he’d wanted anyway; that was cool. It was a cool thing a pretty great friend would do, for a friend. Platonically.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: Stiles and the Sheriff briefly discuss past non-con with the darach (Derek's mentioned, John's remembered)
> 
> Werecats may or may not exist, but definitely not the one in canon, who is super dead forever.
> 
> Derek and Mrs. Zhang are totally bros! He picked up Cantonese at a restaurant on his block in New York, and she mocks his accent and complains about her life. Happy Garden is on his patrol route even if he hasn't been in for a while.
> 
> Dewey’s Lunch Counter in Philadelphia was the site of the first demonstration against transgender discrimination in the country, and Foster’s Cafeteria was a SF-based subsidy of Bickford’s where Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl and exchanged vows with his boyfriend :)
> 
> There is an actual café called the New Moon Diner on the west side of the northern Sierra Nevada :D I might use that in another story


	12. The Pack Meeting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings! Just talking and thinking.

The loft would never be spotless, it wasn’t that kind of space, but Derek had cleaned the floors, counters, tables, upholstery, towels, and the big pile of laundry that tended to accumulate by the washer. He debated the windows, but… no. After one more look around, he rolled up and put away the map.

The mall was basically empty in the morning, thankfully, and he found a set of sturdy white and grey ceramic plates at one of the less awful stores, picked up some other things Laura would have told him to get. The kitchen sets they used in New York had gone to her friend Hannah, which he knew had started as a joke but would never begrudge her. He wasn’t going to risk anything that she’d made, either. He put his short stack of old, chipped dishes on a high shelf; they had been a few dollars from the Goodwill two streets over after he and Isaac had moved in, but there was no reason to throw them out. The accumulated miscellaneous cups and mugs that people were more attached to stayed where they were, on the bottom shelf next to the fridge.

Stiles was so early that he must have come straight from school, and he announced himself with a low whistle as he made it to the kitchen. Derek had let him let himself in, since he was still unpacking the probably excessive amount of food he’d ordered: two salads and a thick soup, oven-safe catering trays of stuffed shells and a chicken pesto thing, tiramisu, assorted cannoli. There would only be four werewolves, after all, though Stiles ate like one. “You and Scott need to take leftovers home tonight,” he said, a little frazzled.

Stiles started laughing at him. “Oh my god,” he said. “Look at you! You’re attempting a magical girl transformation into a real adult.”

Derek painstakingly composed a devastating response while brandishing an oven mitt: “Fuck off.”

“Or what,” Stiles challenged, “you’ll Martha Stewart me to death?”

Derek dropped the mitt next to the stove and leaned back against the counter, rolling out the tension in his shoulders. “Martha Stewart could kill you in cold blood and you know it. But no,” he said mildly, smile going sharp. “Lydia wants to take me shopping. That could be fun.”

Stiles clicked his mouth closed maybe ten seconds later. “You two being friends is terrifying. I must have been a real bastard in a past life.” He muttered something that sounded nonsensically like ‘hot people herd.’

“A past life, sure,” Derek teased.

Stiles glared. “I will stick my whole face in that tiramisu, see if I don’t.” Derek raised his eyebrows. “That doesn’t count, it’s self-defense.” Derek squinted a little. “God, shut up.”

Derek smirked, satisfied, and picked up another dish. He fit most things in the refrigerator, put the stuff he’d have to heat up later in the oven, and looked over at Stiles to ask if he wanted coffee to find him stuck halfway through a yawn. “You can sleep, if you want. I’m pretty much done.”

“Really?” Stiles asked hopefully, “I wasn’t sure if I should take more Adderall yet, or—” Derek waved him off and Stiles dove for the bed, hopping on one leg at a time to leave a scattered path of shoes and flannel. Derek pulled the new dishes out of the dishwasher, stacked them on the lower shelves, and circled quietly to sit cross-legged on the other side of the bed, kicking the trail of layers into a pile on the way. He could get some reading done before everyone else showed up.

When the perimeter alert light went on, Derek hovered his hand over Stiles uncertainly, over his messy hair, the smooth line of his neck, the soft dip of his mouth, finally settling on his shoulder to wake him up gently. As his heartbeat rose, he smooshed his face forward into Derek’s hip, curled up against him while Derek sat with his back to the headboard. Derek felt—it was cute, it was sweet. It was fine.

Stiles shifted enough to blink one eye up at him sleepily. “Hey,” he said, a little croaky, with a soft smile. “I like this one.”

“I hope so,” Derek said, kept it sardonic, and held up his hand so Stiles could count his fingers. Stiles went still, then groaned loudly and knocked his forehead into Derek’s side. They were in the kitchen arguing over coffee by the time Scott and Isaac raced up the stairs.

Derek was pleasantly surprised to find that Scott actually took the crash course in pack formality pretty seriously, after some apparently requisite posturing. When he explained about typical pack structure and having a Second, if Derek hadn’t been turning toward Stiles already he might have missed the flash of relief at Scott saying, “Well, that’s Stiles,” unhesitating, like it was obvious, which it was, unless—Derek didn’t know how being Scott’s emissary might work if Stiles wasn’t a druid, but he and Scott had been pack since they were four. The order of introductions after that had Stiles shooting a sharp glance back at him, but Derek silently asked him to drop it and he did.

The food was back out and the teenagers were as ready as they were going to be by the time Derek went downstairs to meet Amelia at five till six, sure she’d be on time. He was… aware of the impression the crumbling downtown could make, dark streets and cracked sidewalks, too many buildings empty. She was parking on the street as he stepped outside, and he met her at the curb. Amelia had dressed up a little bit, an elegant patterned dress with some kind of complicated shrug thing, and he winced internally, barely avoided looking down at his jeans and thumbhole sweater. At least he had plates. She gave him a small smile as they crossed the stone courtyard to the door. Empty planters lined the walls; landscaping would start when the last construction was finished. That’s what he’d planned, anyway – now it seemed like it might be worth putting in some effort to make it a little less bleak. More lights, at least.

“It’s a work in progress,” he said, not quite an apology, meaning more than the building. He ushered her in and led her through the echoing lobby, still half-deconstructed as the original Art Deco stone and metalwork was restored. “Alpha McCall is upstairs.”

“It’s an interesting space,” she said diplomatically, following him up the twisting stairs.

He smiled a little. “The old pictures of this place are beautiful. I don’t think we can get it to look exactly like it was, but it’s bad enough now that it can only get better,” he said, and then blinked at himself. It was something his grandfather had said to Laura, after her first attempt at straightening her hair. He hadn’t thought about that in a long time.

Amelia grinned, some of her nerves falling away. “That’s a good way to look at it.”

When he pulled open the loft door and ushered her in, the senior pack members were standing in a line between the couches and the door like an incoherently styled indie band, Scott slightly in front, Stiles practically vibrating in place at his right shoulder. Amelia stopped abruptly on the first step down from the door. Derek looked between them and allowed himself a very small sigh. “This is Amelia Spencer. I granted protection. She seeks an audience,” he announced, and went to stand off to the side.

“Hi,” Scott said, and Derek couldn’t help but look to the ceiling, though he managed not to sigh again. Scott cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m Alpha McCall.” He’d practiced saying it for five minutes before he’d stopped stumbling or scrunching up his nose when he said it.

Amelia flicked a look at Derek that perfectly conveyed how much she wished he had given her warnings more specific than “young” and “unorthodox,” and his eyebrows twitched, apologetic but resigned. She took the last two steps to the floor and another two to stand in front of Scott. “Alpha McCall,” she greeted, and tilted her head a little to one side with her chin up.

Scott’s shoulders went back.

A heavy cloak of his alpha strength wrapped around the room, as it so rarely did. Anyone who took a picture before and after the change would be hard pressed to identify the difference, but it was like he suddenly stood in different light, older, darker, confident and powerful. It made his pack stand taller behind him. Derek could tell that Amelia felt the full force of it, read her surprise and quick acceptance. If all you knew about Scott was that he was a true alpha, you might expect that kind of power. It was easy to underestimate him, but in some ways, Scott was already a leader to be reckoned with; in moments like this, Derek could see echoes or faint afterimages of the shape he could take, the alpha he might become. He could be selfish, arrogant, _so_ naïve, but his confidence inspired loyalty, his trust in others let him make their strength his own, and his stubbornness was also determination to do the right thing. There were worse alphas. Derek would include himself among them. Scott’s eyes flared red, and Amelia’s flashed back, beta gold. He reached out with two fingers and gently tapped the base of her neck where she’d left it exposed.

Scott dropped his aura and grinned at her. “Call me Scott,” he said easily. “This is Stiles, my Second, and Isaac and Lydia.”

“Scott,” she repeated weakly, “and…Stiles.” She managed to rally, with only one more confused look at Derek. “Isaac, Lydia. Nice to meet you all. I brought, um—” she opened her purse and pulled out a polished black box with silver hinges. “This is for you.” She handed it to Scott.

“Thank you,” he said, surprised even though Derek had warned him she might have a gift. He opened it gingerly. Inside sat a tooled and woven black leather band, complicated knotwork intertwined with subtle lines of metal and stone beads. “Oh! It’s really nice,” he said earnestly.

“It’s warded for protection,” Amelia said.

Stiles perked up and smacked Scott on the shoulder, and he turned to show it to his pack. Stiles grabbed it and held it up to study closer. “Dude!” he said, “There’s glyphs built right in there, that’s so slick. Protection, sure, I see the—is that obsidian?” Lydia stabbed him in the arm with a wickedly manicured fingernail, and he jerked and looked up at her, frowning, followed her exasperated glance over to Amelia, and jerked again. He dropped the band back in the box and handed it over to Lydia contritely. “I mean, hey. Nice... to meet you… Amelia.” He squinted, and bobbed his head. Amelia nodded back… perplexed, which wasn’t bad, as far as first impressions of Stiles generally went, though her eyes slid over to Derek for a second again and she almost smiled like—maybe nobody else caught it.

Lydia handed the box off to Isaac, who barely glanced at the band before he did the smart thing and squirreled it away in the steel cabinet by the wall, before Scott could do something idiotic like put it on before Stiles was sure what it did. “Tasteful,” Lydia declared. Her eyes narrowed in challenge. “Your wrap is very interesting.”

“Thank you,” Amelia said, “I like your shoes.” Lydia smiled like she’d navigated a proof, so Derek figured there must have been more to it, like some kind of code.

“Are you going to try to kill us?” Isaac asked bluntly. Scott turned back to Amelia looking apologetic, but Stiles pointed at Isaac and then at her like that was a very good question and he wished he’d asked it first.

“What? No!” But she cut herself off and winced, like she’d momentarily forgotten where she was, what they’d seen. “I have no desire to hurt or kill anyone in this town,” she said, slowly, so they could listen to her heart. Scott nodded for the others’ benefit, quick and guilty, followed by a crooked grin at Amelia.

“Okay,” Isaac said, and jerked his thumb toward the kitchen. “Should we…?”

“Yeah, good idea, let’s eat,” Scott said, relieved.

It was easier from there, with the distraction of food. Amelia asked for tea and Stiles gave her the mug with a tacky pawprint pattern, even though there were plain ones with the new dish set. They ate and talked, and it wasn’t a disaster on either side, and Derek kind of drifted. Nobody expected him to contribute much, so he didn’t, and that wasn’t too different from pack dinners growing up. It made him miss the quiet judgement of his grandmother and his grandfather’s indulgent humor, little kids trying to eavesdrop stealthily from upstairs to his dad’s exasperation. He tried to picture Erica at this table, biting back rough humor behind sharp teeth, or letting it out, shooting sly glances at Boyd, who would smile either just at the corners of his eyes or wide and bright as Isaac’s best. Laura had liked having big dinners with her art school friends in New York, and they did holidays like Rosh Hashanah with Jó’s huge family – “the kids,” regardless of age or degree of relation – but they weren’t wolves, weren’t a pack. This—it was different, this kind of dinner, this kind of diplomacy, recruiting. He wondered if his own little pack could have ever gotten to this point, if they’d had a little room to breathe. If anyone in their right mind over the age of eighteen would have ever wanted to join, if he’d stayed an alpha, a lost fuckup with a good name and a bad record.

He didn’t really have a place at this table, but he owed Scott, like he owed all of them. It hurt, sitting on the edge, a nagging, grating reminder. When his betas left, it felt like losing an arm and a leg and learning to walk unbalanced, constantly reaching for something gone. Most of the time, he was used to it. He missed Laura like an arm and a leg and a lung.

Scott walked Amelia out at the end of the night and came back up, and the general agreement was that they should accept her. Amelia had made it clear that her children were her priority and she would prefer to avoid fighting if possible, but she would help keep the territory, of course, which—it might complicate things for Derek, but maybe Scott would listen to another wolf, with less baggage and more experience, and that would be better for everyone. If she still felt that she wanted to move here, nobody could find a reason to refuse. Scott and Isaac took most of the leftovers when they left, which was a relief. Lydia congratulated him on being less of a disaster than expected, which was frankly unwarranted superiority from someone whose entertaining expertise was limited to either full-service catering or booze and cupcakes, and sometimes the booze was poisoned and the party ended in necromancy. No, he took it back, that was unfair; the poison and necromancy had been Peter’s fault. They’d both been used. Stiles set himself up on the couch with homework, some books, and the last of the tiramisu as everyone else cleared out, which was…. He should tell Stiles to leave, he knew he should. He was getting too used to having him around.

“Text your dad if you’ll be here late,” he grumbled instead. Stiles hummed at him and flapped a hand distractedly, and Derek went to brush his teeth. He was ready to collapse into bed and not wake up for a week.

“Question,” Stiles said when he re-emerged to the main space of the loft, “You didn’t really give an opinion on her, one way or another. Amelia.”

“How is that a question,” Derek said, since he so rarely got to use it on other people. He walked across the room, absently mussing up Stiles’s hair as he passed behind the couch.

Stiles grinned at him, soft in the lamp light. “Nobody else believes me when I say you’re funny.”

“It’s a gift,” Derek said, and Stiles laughed, and that was a gift too.

“A blessing and a curse,” he said. “So. If you were still—if it was your call. Would you accept her?”

Derek sighed, sat on the bed, rested his elbows on his knees. “If I didn’t think she might have a place here, I wouldn’t have offered protection. But my pack would have had final say, I guess. If anyone had strong feelings otherwise, then no. It’s important for packmates to be able to trust each other.”

Stiles looked down at the book in his lap. “Is that why you aren’t—”

“It’s fine,” he said, too sharp, so he followed with, “I can’t, Stiles. Leave it alone,” as gently as he could. He was too tired for this. He’d known how it would be, before he came back, at least in that respect. He was here anyway. He took off his shirt and threw it in the direction of the washer.

“It’s not really,” Stiles said unhappily.

“It’s hardly the worst thing I’ve lived with.” Derek was trying to be reassuring, almost managed a smile, but the look he got in return just had irritation added in.

“Even the twins left, you said. You said it would be _idiotic_ for Amelia.” he accused.

“Yeah. I’m not them.” He rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “My home is here, with or without Scott’s approval.”

Stiles blew air out of his mouth in an angry huff. “You must kind of hate him.”

“No,” Derek said first, because he had to make that clear. “I don’t trust him. I don’t know if I ever will,” he said honestly. “I know he’ll try to keep you safe, and Isaac, your dad, Melissa, Lydia. I just can’t trust _how_ , or what else he’ll put first. Even if he is a true alpha, even after all the time I spent wanting him to be pack, I just… can’t.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’ve been told that’s a personal failing.”

“No, that’s—I get that,” Stiles said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you did, after Gerard.”

“Yeah, well. He could’ve killed me for the alpha power and given the bite himself,” Derek said. “Or killed me afterward. Most people in his place probably would.” He’d spent too long thinking about it. “That would have been worse.”

Stiles paused, even his silence incredulous. “Um, yeah, because then _Peter_ would have killed _him_ , or might not have been able to fix Jackson, and one of them – _or Allison_ – would have murdered the rest of us.”

“Exactly.”

Stiles frowned at him for a long moment, until Derek dropped backwards onto the bed.

“And _Scott would have killed you_ ,” Stiles said, and Derek rolled his eyes. “I would have been pissed the fuck off about it for the last five terrifying minutes of my life.”

“That would have meant a lot to my mangled corpse,” he shot back, but he was oddly touched. They hadn’t even been friends at that point, not really.

Without raising his head, he could tell Stiles was still frowning.

“I don’t get it. Why did you do all this? Why help? Why even let us use the loft?”

“Stiles—”

“Don’t say it’s because you owe us, because that’s _bullshit_ , okay? Don’t.”

Not you, Derek thought, because owing implied a possibility of parity, however remote. He sighed, shucked his pants, got under the covers, and stared at the ceiling while he thought about an answer Stiles would accept. “Scott needs betas,” he settled on, “Especially experienced ones, who can help if—and if he stays weak, it invites challenge. It wouldn’t be fair to Amelia or any of you for me to ignore a call in good faith, when nobody else could answer.”

“You—If—”

“I said whatever you need,” he interrupted, too sharp again. “That’s not going to change.” Another bout of silence, while Derek closed his eyes and berated himself.

“Derek, that was a year ago,” Stiles said slowly. “You said that to your own pack. Everything’s changed.” Derek turned over, feeling suddenly exposed.

“Yeah, I said it to Isaac,” he said into the pillow. Not annoyed. Maybe embarrassed. “I said it to you.” After a minute, he turned his head to the side, so he would be clearer. “Don’t get near me if you need to wake me up. Just make noise. Or throw something.”

“Throw something,” Stiles repeated flatly.

“Preferably not sharp.”

“Too bad the pasta shells are gone,” he said thoughtfully, after a pause. “Splat, right in the face, that would’ve been perfect.”

Derek snorted. He focused on his breath, on loosening his muscles one by one, on emptying his mind. After a few minutes, he broke the comfortable silence. “How did your math test go?” His voice was rough, his eyelids heavy, but he kept forgetting to ask.

“It was fine,” Stiles said, almost confused, as if he hadn’t been complaining about it off and on for a week before missing the review. “Don’t worry about it. Lydia walked me through the chapter, she says it’s good practice for being a professor.”

“Good,” he mumbled, and pushed his face into the pillow.

Eventually, Stiles’s attention went back to his homework and the glyph book, and the soft scratch of graphite on paper and the steady thump of his heart followed Derek into sleep. He didn’t remember his dreams.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After I gave Stiles a Batman mug I started thinking about what he would assign to other people, but I didn't end up doing anything with it so here is my list:
> 
> Stiles – Batman  
> Scott – The Hulk  
> Lydia – Wonder Woman  
> Isaac – Scarecrow  
> Erica – Catwoman  
> Boyd – Mr. Freeze (the ice rink :D)  
> Derek – Luthorcorp stylized L (Lex Luthor for the DC villain theme), or Aquaman (hates people, shouldn’t wear shirt) or Wolverine (same plus claws)  
> Cora – Mercy (Luthorcorp)  
> Allison – Hawkeye  
> Kira – Groot  
> Malia – Gamora  
> Braeden – Martian Manhunter (or Black Widow)  
> Chris – Green Arrow (the lame asshole archer)  
> Melissa – Zatanna (whatever she says, happens)  
> Sheriff – Captain America  
> Jackson – Cyclops  
> Peter – Minecraft zombie
> 
> Next chapter is loooong and THINGS HAPPEN, I promise :D


	13. The Storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stiles is beleaguered, Derek thinks about going outside, Lydia has a feeling. Little bit of fluff, little bit of angst, little bit of ACTION! Warnings with minor spoilers in the end notes.

Stiles was at least half-expecting the talk at lunch the next day to turn to Derek at some point, at least in a “can you believe he has nice plates now” or “did you notice he said less than ten words at dinner” kind of way. What he was not expecting was for Scott to turn to him as his tray hit the table and say, “Hey, so, what’s up with you and Derek?” Stiles only continued sitting at all because the complete tray down-sit down motion was so ingrained in his muscle memory. It just got worse, if that was even possible, when he looked around the rest of the table for some moral support or at least a fucking clue where this was coming from and all his other so-called friends were either partially turned away from their own conversations in a way that meant they were very invested in listening in or actively sitting forward and not even giving him a polite fiction to the contrary. Kira was the only one who looked even vaguely apologetic, and she hadn’t even _met_ Derek until like two days ago; Allison was uncomfortably shifting in her seat next to Isaac, who had his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands over a half-eaten bag of cinnamon almonds.

So Stiles was feeling a little ambushed, okay, but he decided to play it cool. “What the fuck, Scott?” he said instead. Damn it. All eyes in the peanut gallery snapped to him, then swiveled to their alpha.

Scott leaned toward him. “Dude,” he said. Kind of condescending! The traitors turned to Stiles for a rebuttal.

“ _Dude_ ,” he said back.

Scott crossed his arms. “Dude.” Hardball.

“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” Stiles said. He stood and picked up his tray. “I’m going to eat in the library.” He left.

“You can’t eat in the library!” Scott yelled after him.

“ _You_ can’t eat in the library,” Stiles countered, which might have seemed nonsensical but was actually a salient counterpoint, because Stiles had been allowed to eat in the library ever since he helped Mrs. Romero reorganize the shelves on the south wall to accommodate expansion of the “Folklore and Mythology” section during a week of detentions. So. Check and mate.

Scott lasted not even ten minutes before he texted, interrupting what had become a moderately scary Wikipedia spiral of weird plants. _Sry I shouldn’t of said anything at lunch, were all just curios_.

 _Oh WERE you merely statuettes. No, ignore that. Not cool dude_ , he sent back. _Wait. Is that what that look was for when you left last night?_ He didn’t get a response for long enough that he went back to Wikipedia.

 _u look at each other a lot_ , Scott eventually replied.

_??_

_u do_

_so???_  Maybe Stiles knew exactly what he meant, because he’d noticed immediately when Scott had stopped looking at him to smile at Allison, but that wasn’t a parallel he wanted to make, ever. That way lay madness. For both of them. Everybody. More than usual. Just, catastrophic, apocalyptic madness. Besides, they never used to have anybody to look at besides each other; Stiles had figured it was part of, you know, getting slightly more popular and having other friends, no matter what fucked-up supernatural disasters actually precipitated that change. So Scott could suck it up, was his point. He looked at Isaac now anyway.

_u kno where all the stuff is in his ktchn_

_Are you mad at me for making coffee?????_

_…_ , Scott sent, which made Stiles want to punch something, then, _I just dont get why u like him_

 _You used to say the same thing about Lydia_ , Stiles sent, and immediately—Crap, shitfuck, if only you could un-send messages.

But, _… ok_ , Scott sent, _w/e_ , and the eyeroll.

So he thought they were fine, in English, because it wasn’t like Scott’s constipated face about Derek was anything new, and they just talked about the reading before class and whether to invite Kira into their supernatural club or not – it was more of a question of when than if; Stiles thought that if she was a kitsune anyway, it was already her life, so why wait? Plus, the longer they put it off and stayed friends with her, the more likely it was she’d figure it out some other way and be pissed off about being left out, like Lydia, and _Allison_ , and Jackson, and Melissa, and his dad. So. Scott wanted to make it through the semester first, because he was already kind of overwhelmed with catching up in school and working as much as possible and moping-slash-panicking about Allison and Isaac and now _also_ maybe new betas. But, proving that Scott had zero actual remorse, the assault continued that afternoon at lacrosse practice, while they were broken up in short lines for shooting drills under dark clouds that had Stiles glancing up warily. Storms still kind of put him on edge, since the—since the last time he’d crashed the jeep in the woods.

“What did you think about dinner with Amelia?” Scott asked. Stiles was trapped in a sandwich between him and Isaac while Kira and the angry freshman, Liam, ran around each other with intimidating competence.

Stiles groaned in frustration. “You know what? Fine. He was quiet, yeah, but he had to be social like three days in a row, so he probably just like, hit his word limit for the week before she got there,” Stiles said, and didn’t mention the sad eyebrows all night, or their conversation after, or the way he kept tracing a finger over the stylized _L_ of his Luthorcorp mug, or how he passed out (in _nothing but underwear_ , on his stomach, with his arms tucked under the pillow) instead of running his usual circuit of the town. Scott and Isaac exchanged a loaded glance, annoyingly. He kind of wanted to talk to _someone_ about a lot of things, actually, like the maroon sweater with thumbholes, or how Derek had still been asleep when he left after midnight, all those shoulders just right out there for anyone to stare at, and Stiles had wanted to poke at his unconscious frown. Or like, cuddle. Scott kind of owed him for being unbearable about Allison for so long, but: madness. Lydia knew too much already. His dad would start keeping wolfsbane bullets in the house, if he didn’t already – actually, that wasn’t a bad idea anyway, just in case. Amelia seemed okay, but every other werewolf they’d met had tried to kill them at some point, so. If Stiles were feeling like this about anybody but Derek… it was hard to imagine it being anybody but Derek. But hey, Stiles was pathetic, he was _painfully_ aware. “The new plates are nice, though, right?” he tried. Fuckbuckets, that wasn’t less pathetic at all.

“You know he and Braeden probably have sex, like, a lot,” Isaac interjected.

A red-black flare of anger and jealousy hit him without warning. “ _First_ of all, fuck you,” he snarled, but Isaac’s eyebrows were up, daring him to continue, so he bit it back, tamped it down, rolled his eyes. Huffed. “Second, she’s not in town that much. More importantly, the one time I asked if they were together, she laughed for like five minutes and said they had a mutual defense agreement, which is definitely a no, because that’s like—he and I have had a codependent lifesaving thing way longer.” Isaac opened his mouth and held up a finger. Stiles glared at him and barreled on. “But, _most_ importantly—” and he stopped, swallowed against sudden bitterness as he deflated. “Most importantly, why should I even care. It’s none of my business.” It _wasn’t_ a lie, even if—even if it felt like one. Isaac grinned creepily and winked at him. Stiles flipped him off.

“Kelly Thompson in homeroom said he gets coffee with other people all the time. There’s one guy who comes in with him in the morning a _lot_ ,” Scott said, eyes narrowed.

Stiles frowned at him. “Fucking Kelly,” he muttered. If she only worked at the stupid coffee shop for the gossip, that was—that would be kind of brilliant of her, actually. Ugh. “If he gets half-caf macchiatos, that’s Craig Mendoza, he’s the general contractor for the building restora—wait, are you—Craig’s _devoted_ to José, they have three kids.” For his own sanity, Stiles was just going to assume that Derek’s ability to be attracted to and form relationships with asshole hipster dudes wasn’t _widely_ known, so while wasn’t about to _deny_ that Derek was bi, he could absolutely avoid confirmation by keeping it to himself. And Isaac, because Isaac knew. He kind of hated Isaac right now. He kind of hated everybody. Fighting with Scott was like fighting with his dad; even if he was right, he could never win, because it twisted him up so much inside. He really, really didn’t want this to be a fight; he just didn’t know what Scott’s _problem_ was.

“I think you’ve got a shot with him. You should go for it,” Danny said from in front of Scott.

“Danny! With who! What!” Stiles was losing coherency. How long had _Danny_ been listening?

Danny rolled his eyes. “I know who Derek Hale is, Stiles. I set up the secure server for your botany club, or whatever you’re calling it.”

“Beacon Hills High School Junior Chapter of the Beacon County Wildlife Conservancy,” Stiles corrected helpfully. “BHHS JCBCWC, for short,” pronounced jic-bic-wic, because that was fun to say.

“Nobody’s ever going to call it that,” Isaac said, _un_ helpfully. And clearly wrong.

“ _I’m_ calling it that,” Stiles countered.

Danny shook his head like it could help him forget the last twenty seconds. “ _Whatever_. Even the first time I met him, you only called him Miguel for like, five minutes.”

“Damn. What a glorious five minutes they were, though, right?”

“You are really a terrible person,” Danny said. “You should definitely go for it. Publicly. Either he shoots you down and its hilarious, or you finally have sex with someone and shut up for two minutes. Either way, it _has_ to make you less annoying.”

“Two minutes! Danny,” Stiles said, shocked, betrayed, offended, _resolutely ignoring_ the rest of it, “I thought you were the nice one.”

“Yeah, compared to Jackson,” Danny said, and ran out to shoot.

Kira joined the back of their line and leaned on Isaac’s shoulder. “Are we talking about Stiles and Derek again?” she asked.

“We were literally talking about someone else and Stiles brought him up out of nowhere,” Isaac told her.

“No!” Stiles said, too loudly; Coach blew the whistle and made them run until the clouds broke open and fat drops of rain turned the field into sloshing mud.

If Scott wasn’t looking at him, he definitely didn’t notice, because he wasn’t looking at Scott, either.

~*~

Derek opened his eyes and stared out the windows at the roiling sky, heard a distant rumble of thunder. He needed to track down Kira’s parents and set up a meeting with Satomi. He needed to figure out what was going on with the touchstones. He needed to let the demolition company get started on the house. He had work to do in the woods, and he should run the borders. He should order bookshelves. He should open another box. He was out of milk. It was dark under the threatening clouds, grey and miserable outside, but he was warm, comfortable, and safe as he ever was. He turned over, curled in on himself around the fading scent of poprocks, and shut out the world for a little bit longer.

Rain slamming hard into the windows finally drove him out of bed long hours later, accompanied by crashing thunder and bright strobes of lightning across the black night. He pushed himself through a short, brutal workout, showered, warmed up thick leftover soup in a mug, and thought about going up to the roof deck. Part of him loved storms like this, how they made him feel small and lost, the most dramatic reminder that nature was callous and consuming and could obliterate anyone at any time, really, he wasn’t special. It would fulfill one of Laura’s rules, too, set in stone their first year in New York: every day he had to eat real food at least once, talk to or make eye contact with a person, and go outside. The soup counted as real food, so he was one for three. He’d won that argument early on with the Dead Kennedys song.

“Soup is good food. I made a good meal,” he’d paraphrased, and she’d laughed; he’d kept going, said-sang it, flat and teasing through “you know how much I’d like to die,” like it was a joke, not meeting her eyes, but she’d been fighting hard for both of them for a year and a half by then. She’d known.

“That’s _against the rules_ ,” she’d said fiercely, and punched him in the arm hard enough to put a hairline fracture in his humerus. “Rule _Zero_. Nobody else _remembers_ them, Derek! You can’t make me do this alone.” An elaborate flowchart had eventually spread across the fridge to officially determine qualifying meals.

Then she’d left him, instead, and now he had to remember her too.

The chart was probably in one of the boxes.

When he got around to checking his phone, there was a message from Cora waiting: _so how much did the visiting beta flip at alpha baby face_ with an emoji of a puppy.

 _Some. Quietly. I think she’s mostly relieved he’s not a complete dick_ , he sent back.

 _Just like 90%_ , she replied, and he rolled his eyes.

_He’s not that bad. He hasn’t challenged me._

_lbr, only bc he doesn’t know he should_. That might be true – Derek wasn’t about to start that conversation – but he didn’t think it was the only reason.

 _He wouldn’t know what to do with the preserve. He barely keeps the high school_. Scott was baffling. _Besides, maybe I’d win._

 _You’d feel bad about it._ Cora sent a string of puppy faces. It didn’t seem like they were just for Scott anymore. A dark, savage part of him wasn’t sure she was right.

 _Are you still reading Ternura? How do you like Gabriela Mistral?_ he sent, blatantly changing the subject, but she let him, and they talked about her life and the Díaz pack instead.

There were a few texts from Stiles, too. One standard nonsensical text from either too late or too early – those usually woke him up, but it was a string of emojis, so nothing important, and it meant he hadn’t fallen asleep on the couch; a picture of a caterpillar in the parking lot before school; and the last, from several hours ago, around noon: _Pretty sure that tentacle plant is an invasive species from Australia amazingly called octopus stinkhorn_.

 _The red thing or the vines_ , Derek sent back. The red ones looked like demonic land-borne cephalopods and smelled like rotting flesh, though. The ellipsis to show Stiles was typing popped up almost immediately, so he was probably home from school. He imagined Stiles at his desk, reaching for any excuse to procrastinate on homework, long fingers tapping against his phone as he spun in his chair, worrying his lips with his teeth, watching rain pattern the windows like Derek was.

 _Gee idk maybe the one that smells disgusting and looks like an octopus_ , Stiles replied, and kept typing, so Derek waited. If he’d still had lacrosse practice with the storm, he might be in shorts, hair soft from the rain or a shower, fluffy without product. He might—Derek thought again about the roof deck. The rain should be cold. _I think we should salt and burn the vines_ , Stiles sent.

He grimaced. Dryads would be pissy about that; it might be worth trying to talk to them first. _Lake tomorrow?_ he sent.

_If it’s still raining were staying in_

Derek sent the ambulance emoji, but only as routine. Going up on the roof was one thing, but trudging around in the woods in beating down rain was an experience worth avoiding.

His phone buzzed with another text. _Hey if we have Australian fungus maybe we have some other transplants, right? Yes? Maybe in the lake?_

_Stiles, we don’t have bunyips. I would have heard something. It was a weed._

_IT WAS NOT_

_This is the “kelpie” in Glenwood all over again_

Pealing thunder rattled all the glass in the building as the sky flashed with searing brightness. A pile of texts came in while the thunder was still rumbling.

 _NO SHUT UP that was totakjyu_  
_HOLY SHT did u se e that???_  
_Lyds almost drove off the road_

Derek frowned at his phone and stabbed out a response. _Why the fuck are you driving in this??_

 _She was driving me home and then, banshee sense. Want to come?_ Stiles sent, with an emoji line of droplets that Derek guessed was for the rain.

Derek glared down at his sweatpants, and out at the storm, and back at his phone again.

_No._

_Meet us outside!_ and a bouquet of flowers. Derek sent a knife.

Three for three for Laura’s rules, at least.

There was a new, careful mess of tangled lines drawn with chalk above the heavy sliding door of the loft. He reached up on his way out, close enough to almost smudge it with a finger, felt it hum. He'd have to ask Stiles about it later.

~*~

Ads on the radio that only Lydia could hear led them to the half-built mall on the valley edge of town. The multi-story concrete shell loomed balefully when bolts of light cracked across the sky, but otherwise it was dark, without even emergency lights. Just a shell. Most of a parking garage was attached, and Lydia parked there, on the ground floor. Stiles had grabbed the big Maglite from the back of the Jeep for himself, and he gave Lydia the pen light from his bag, as well as, with great ceremony, the metal bat.

She gave him a withering look. “In a _thunderstorm_ , Stiles?”

He threw up his arms and protested, “We’re inside!” Derek caught the bat before it accidentally beaned him in the face. He shot Stiles an unimpressed look, and Stiles blanched. “Oh my god, no, I can’t handle this in stereo.” He hefted the Maglite and left the bat in the car.

With Lydia’s silent voices giving no more precise direction, they wandered through the dusty, echoing concrete halls. Wind howled around the raw beams and carried in the scent of crackling rain. “It’s like a modern Mines of Moria in here,” Stiles said, the spotlight from his flashlight bouncing crazily, and Derek was a little startled to realize he’d never been here, that he hadn’t helped plan the fight against the alpha pack, that he hadn’t helped track the kanima. It seemed like he should have been, somehow, even though it was absurd, even though it would have been too dangerous for him to be within a mile of either fight.

“I almost died with Ennis over there,” Derek pointed. “On the escalator.” It was easily twenty feet between levels and he’d fallen off the third floor, but it wouldn’t have been so bad if he hadn’t been cut to shit first. “That crater in the wall was from Scott.” He craned his neck to find the familiar open bones of what might have been a department store. “I fought the kanima in the parking garage, and ran down there when the Argents starting shooting at me.”

“So this is like, a walk down shitty memory lane. Nice,” Stiles said.

Derek shrugged. “No worse than the high school.” No worse than the rest of the town, really; there was an empty lot where a Dairy Queen used to be that he still couldn’t drive past, because Kate had taken him there.

“I remember looking forward to this place being finished, when we were in middle school. We would’ve had a Saks closer than Chico,” Lydia said. “I wonder what happened.”

“Maybe it’s cursed, you know, ancient Indian burial site,” Stiles said, waving his fingers against his flashlight to make a spooky flicker. It was bright enough to turn his fingers red where the light shone through.

“No, that’s on the other side of town. Protected, thankfully. There’s a map in the Historical Society,” Derek said. “This is sour ground. As far as I know, it always has been. Nothing grows here. The county shouldn’t have sold it.” His mother would have stopped it, if she’d still been on the zoning committee; if not through official channels, then by letting loose some endangered frogs, or something.

“Wait, I was right? The mall _is_ cursed?”

Derek sighed. “Yes, Stiles, the mall is cursed.”

“I’m going to college and never coming back,” Lydia muttered, and Derek pretended the reminder wasn’t a dull stab in the stomach.

“What—” Stiles started. A shock of white light was chased by a deafening tear of thunder, and he jumped. “That must have been like—No delay, it sounded like it was right on top of us,” he said, and the three of them looked up, through flickering dust motes caught in the beams of the flashlights.

“That’s it,” Lydia said, “The roof.”

Stiles coughed nervously. “If we go up there, it’s safe now, right? Lightning won’t strike twice.”

“Unless the target’s grounded,” she countered, “then it’s significantly more likely to keep striking the same place over and over.”

“Shit. Really? That’s less catchy,” he complained. “What are the odds they put in a lightning-grounding system before they finished the walls?”

“It’ll travel through the girders and steel reinforcements in the concrete,” Lydia said.

“Not even a little convenient. Ugh.”

“We could leave,” Lydia suggested uncertainly. They looked at each other. Derek waited.

“No, you’re right, we can’t,” Stiles sighed.

“There’s stairs over this way,” Derek said.

“ _Stairs_ ,” Stiles groaned, as if that was the worst news yet.

The wide, bare stairwell funneled any noise around and around them; over the steady drumming of rain, rumbling thunder was loud enough to feel in their guts.

“No recent human smells,” Derek noted as they climbed, after one set of echoes died out.

“No footprints, either,” Stiles said.

“This isn’t the only stairwell,” Lydia pointed out, “They could have gone up another way.”

“Or! Maybe it’s a helicopter crash,” Stiles said.

Derek looked to the sky, but it was blocked by curling layers of disintegrating stairs. “Yeah, wouldn’t that be so cool,” he said dryly. The occasional gust of wind came shrieking down past them, damp with rain.

“Here’s an idea, what if it’s _not_ a dead body?” Lydia snapped.

“Low odds,” Derek had to say.

“Yeah, sorry Lyds, you’ve got a specialty.”

Her irritated huff echoed on the concrete.

When they were almost to the top, even the humans could tell, from the scent and overwhelming sound of rain through the opening that would’ve held a door. Stiles looked back and Derek and pointed at his ear and chest, but Derek shook his head; he couldn’t even pick out the heartbeats beside him over the relentless pounding of the rain. Stiles nodded grimly and looked at Lydia. Derek stood on the step above them. “If we can’t see anything from the top, I’ll step outside and look around. You two stay covered. Lydia, scream if you see anyone else. Stiles, keep the ash handy, we don’t know what’s up there. Keep the flashlight away from the door. If you have to come out for anything—” he hesitated. They weren’t wolves; they wouldn’t heal. On the other hand, he wouldn’t either, struck by lightning.

“Go fast, stay low,” Stiles said. Derek jerked his head in assent. Lydia’s jacket was both stylish and waterproof, but Stiles’s was barely more than another flannel. Derek had the fleeting thought he should have brought him something heavier from the loft. Too late now.

Another peal of thunder like the sky ripping open sounded on the heels of stark strobing light flooding in half a flight above them, but this time, they were close enough to feel all their hair stand on end before it happened, and hear the sizzle of rain superheated to vapor and the deafening crack of the lightning strike itself, and smell the hot metal-ozone afterward in what felt like ringing silence. Everybody swore and covered their ears, too late. That violent smell was everywhere, so overpowering Derek could taste it, blood in his mouth like one of Erica’s auras, and it felt like static sparks were jumping through his hair, between his ribs, shocking his heart.

“You never were good with electricity, were you,” he heard, just in his head, _just in his head_ , a laughing, mocking ghost.

“This is such a bad idea,” Stiles cursed, distorted as Derek’s eardrums were still healing. Lydia’s eyes were locked somewhere above and away from them, her face twisted like she was fighting back a scream already.

Derek clenched his jaw, flexed his hands out of their fists, shook himself to feel the borders of his skin. “Stay back,” he yelled, “We’ll just look.”

As soon as they crept up the last few steps, Derek could see a huge metal tower, maybe a hundred yards away. Even the Maglite beam was too weak to be clear through the lashing rain, but Derek thought there was something, someone, trapped at the base. A shudder ran through him. Chained, helpless, waiting for the lightning…. He pointed at himself and pointed at the tower.

Stiles grabbed his arm and yelled at him. “Anyone out there is two hundred percent dead, Derek!” But he looked at Lydia and she was shaking, staring at the base of the tower, her lips pursed so hard they were white.

“I have to be sure,” he said, leaning in until their temples touched so Stiles could hear him. If there was any chance, any chance at all, that there was a person, that they somehow weren’t dead yet, he couldn’t leave. He had to _know_ that he’d done all he could, or he’d never forgive himself. He held up both hands to tell them to stay, turned, zipped up his coat, took a deep breath, and sprinted for the tower. The rain was like a solid wall, and gusting wind tried to knock him off his feet. Forks of lightning skittered through the clouds, thunder still booming along with it, but reflections of the stuttering light slid off a set of heavy manacles attached by chains to low joints in the girders of the tower, hanging a body between them with arms stretched out to the sides, like Prometheus on the rock. Halfway to the tower, he could tell the person was standing, barely, surrounded by a rough circle of scorch marks, and he shifted to beta form for the extra strength and speed. He knew who it was, even though he couldn’t see her face, head hanging between arms pulled taut. He slashed his claws to score a weak point in a link in the chains on each side, snapped apart one, then the other, and used the trailing weight still on the cuffs around her wrists to anchor her arms over his shoulders. Kira slumped against him, and he scooped her up, hugged her close. She was soaked to the skin, ice cold, but mumbling, half-delirious, _alive_.

The air was starting to crackle with building charge as he put everything he had into racing back to the stairs. Not even slowing, he blew past Stiles and Lydia, careened off the far wall, taking the impact on his shoulder, and jumped down to the lower landing just as the next bolt of lightning hit the roof. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure they were following and went down another two flights, away from the drumming rain and the gaping doorway. He set her down gently, leaning against a wall, and took his jacket off to drape over her shoulders, collapsed to the wall beside her, breathing hard, eyes shut tight, as footsteps thundered down the steps, Stiles and Lydia catching up.

“Holy fucking shit, you asshole, that was close, that was way too close,” Stiles said on a shaky breath. “What did— _Kira_?”

“She’s not even scorched,” Lydia said, faint, and her hand shot out to grip Stiles’s shoulder. “Stiles, she’s _alive_ ,” she was suddenly grinning maniacally, shaking his arm in a white-knuckled grip, giddy from the adrenaline.

“You’re the best,” Stiles told her, grinning too, his other hand on Derek’s shoulder. “We're the best. Not just bodies!” he shouted victoriously, and thunder growled down the stairwell as if in answer.

“This is a kitsune manifestation, right? Surviving lightning strikes, it’s—elemental affinity, energy absorption, those are kitsune powers.” _Lydia_ was babbling.

“Oh my god, Kira’s electric type,” Stiles kind of giggled. Derek could only think that he wasn’t sure which possibility was worse: either a) someone knew she was, and did this to her for some undoubtedly malevolent purpose, or b) someone _didn’t_ know, and did it _anyway_. Derek hadn’t seen anybody else on the roof, but he could barely see anything. They needed to leave.

He picked up one of the shackles locked on her wrist and tapped it with a claw, examining it more closely, now that there was time. “Stiles, can you,” he said, or started to, but Stiles was already beside him holding lockpicks, and with him working under Lydia’s flashlight, the heavy manacles clicked open and clattered to the ground in short order. The sound seemed to rouse Kira, who had started shivering, probably a sign she was warming up. He put some space between them, so she wouldn’t be scared.

“Lydia?” Kira sounded dazed, and her eyes went in and out of focus.

“Kira, honey,” she said, as gentle as he’d ever heard her, “What do you remember?”

“Blue eyes,” she murmured, and Derek went stiff, his first thought that she’d seen him snap the chains in beta shift, that she must be afraid of him; _blue-eye_ was an epithet he’d been hit with before, by people who knew what it meant. Then he thought, maybe Peter’s—maybe Peter. “Lacrosse, we had to run because Stiles was talking about Derek.” Derek shot Stiles a look, and Stiles started shaking his head frantically. Kira didn’t seem to notice, eyes distant as she searched her memory. “Then there was a fox, a black fox, I followed… my mom told me to trust the fox, I didn’t know what she meant, but I saw it and it saw me, and I thought—this is crazy, this is _crazy_ , but there’s all—I thought—”

“Your mother was part of this?” Lydia asked sharply.

“No, no,” Kira started to shake her head, and she was racked with a violent shiver. “No. But. I don’t know. There was a guy.” She sniffed, and tried to wipe her face, but her sleeve was just as cold and wet as the rest of her. “He said he was my _dad_.” Her voice broke on the last word, and some of the wetness on her cheeks was tears, not rain.

“Hey, hey, no,” Stiles said, and he sat down next to her, close enough to share some heat. “We know your dad; your dad is awesome.”

“Why would he _say_ that? Why did he _know_ me?” She whispered, “He knew what I am. That I’m a monster.”

“He kidnapped you and hurt you. _He’s_ a monster,” Lydia said fiercely, leaving no room for argument. “He’s not your dad.” Kira buried her face in Stiles’s shoulder as more tears escaped.

“Do you want to go to the police?” Stiles asked. She shook her head against his shoulder. “Do you… want to go home?” She hesitated, but shook her head harder, and he looked up helplessly.

“Your house,” Derek told him. “Dry clothes, food.”

She looked up at the sound of his voice. “D—Derek?” Her whole body was shaking. “I had the weirdest dream…” her eyes lost focus again.

He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m going to carry you out of here, okay? You’ve got my jacket, there, you can put it on if you’re cold.”

“Your hair’s wet,” she said, confused, and he let himself smile a little bit.

“Yours too,” he said seriously. “I’m okay.” She put a hand to her hair like she hadn’t realized, and sniffled some more, and Lydia handed her a dry tissue from her pocket.

Derek carried Kira down a few flights of stairs, until she felt she could walk.

They were on the first floor of the mall when the shockwave hit. The center of the explosion was more than a mile away, they found out later, but the edge of the front still hit the skeleton of the mall with a sudden impact like a titanic slap. Derek barely kept his feet, though he caught Kira before she went sprawling; Lydia shrieked and grabbed onto Stiles. The floor jolted like an earthquake, concrete more attached to the shaking walls than the solid ground. The eerie perfect silence in its wake was broken by the groan of settling girders, the crackle of falling concrete, a rushing wind, and the distant cacophony of every car alarm in town. When they picked themselves up and ventured cautiously outside, the storm had dissipated completely, leaving only an inky black sky, low clouds hiding the stars.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Derek thinks about Laura; brief flashback talking about suicidal ideation. Later, a character is found in canon-typical peril (off-screen kidnapping, non-sexual assault). Electricity is involved, no torture, but Derek really does not like being around it, and he’s reminded of Kate but gets through it. Kidnapped character is pretty out of it, upset, but physically okay. They were hurt by a stranger claiming to be their father.


	14. Interlude: Coup de Foudre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: little bit of creepy, little bit of violence, and a confrontation with a pushy ex.

A long time ago, as some might count, Noshiko Yukimura was a girl from a fishing village, and it was spring, and she fell in love with a boy. He was strong and clever and beautiful and arrogant, a low-ranking warrior for the Minamoto clan, only a hundred years older than her. The moment their eyes met across a neatly paved courtyard, they recognized in each other a kinship of spirit, so to speak; a kinship of kind. She’d smiled mischievously behind a stolen fan, he’d smirked and cocked his head with his hand on the hilt of his sword, and her eyes had slid to another man with a katana, near him, who had stolen something precious from her sister: a little glowing ball, the physical representation of her first tail. The boy’s eyes had widened in surprise and his lips had curled in delight, and the man died in agony a few hours later. Before another hundred years had passed, soft rain fell from a clear sky, and they were wed.

That was who Noshiko mourned, on her knees in the dead mud and cracked ash. The boy she loved though battle after battle as the Minamoto destroyed the Fujiwara, who fought by his own rules, changed sides as he wished, lived easily on the power of blood and war. Who brought her gifts, read her poetry, and she washed the rolling heads of their enemies to present to his generals. They were happy. When Mongols invaded, he followed their ships back to the mainland, and she stayed behind, by the sea, where the energy of the tides and currents could sustain her. They lived centuries together and lifetimes, continents apart, took other lovers, but when either of them called, the other would answer. She had called him to the outskirts of Beacon Hills, heartbroken, in blinding rage, and he had come. She had cursed her cruel enemies, her careless friends, the earth she bled on at Oak Creek, and he had brought his violence with vengeful laughter. She knew it wasn’t his fault, that afterward she regretted the slaughter. She knew it was how he loved.

It had been seventy years since then. Another lifetime. The blink of an eye.

“You shouldn’t have been able to escape,” she said. He’d appeared at her front door, leaning insouciantly against the jamb, a soul she would recognize in any form, though he’d left his own body behind long ago. In a leather jacket, like Rhys, who had loved her too. He always kept a little piece of the ones he possessed. His fingers tapped against the soft wood of the jamb, one-two-three-four.

He tilted his head, raised an eyebrow, mocking. “Not yet, maybe, on my own.” He smiled his wicked smile, just around the eyes, the barest turn of his lips, familiar even on a strange face. “You hid a maggot inside a mushroom, Noshiko-chan. All that power? You must have known I would eat my way out.”

“No, you were trapped, it was _dead_.” She’d thought it would be his tomb, when they cut it down. She had been sure. But then, she’d been sure the first time, when she’d buried his soul in the roots. Maybe she should have known better, once she’d realized he’d infected his prison.

The lazy smirk returned. “The leaves, yes; the branches. But the roots? Our roots? Not so easy,” he said, condescending, _proud_. “We had eyes and teeth that crawled through a thousand miles. Through a thousand souls. Each a little well of suffering.”

“If you were so content, why leave?” she challenged. He held up a hand, smirking, and a bright spark danced between his fingertips. Her mind jumped to Kira, and her breath caught. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“What I’ve always wanted, little thief. Pain to feast on, a game to win,” he reached out for her face, cradled her cheek in his hand, so gently; the scent of it was ozone, and tar, and blood, always blood. “And you. Your enemies are my enemies. That was my vow.” She leaned into his touch, her heart torn, even as her skin crawled. “And now there’s Kira, our Kira. I’ve been watching her, too.”

“She is not yours,” she said, but he dismissed it with the wave of a hand.

“Isn’t she? Water, chaos,” he gestured between them, “and she is a storm.” He was so _satisfied_.

“She wasn’t _ready_ ,” she said angrily.

“Now she is,” he said, and shrugged one shoulder. “Now she’ll be strong. And now I’m here. You were annoyed with me, I know, but now we can protect her, together. Let me show you what I’ve done. Let me make you happy, Noshiko-chan.” He leaned in to kiss her, and she kissed him back, just once, helpless not to, a greeting, a goodbye. There was time for her to be glad that Ken was at the police station, and to hope Kira was safe – that Noshiko could keep her safe – and then she’d summoned her aura, wreathed herself in radiant foxfire, insubstantial tails whipping through the air and walls. Three tails, her weakest, dissolved in a shower of embers and settled into her skin, lighting her with a surge of fiery determination. In response, he called his own cloak of curling, burning shadow. “Three, really,” he said, “You _are_ still upset with me,” and his eyes had danced.

With their first clash, the ground trembled. One by one, tails burst and burned and fueled her, as the house and sheltering trees crumbled around them. Her final, desperate, decisive move registered on seismographs a hundred miles away.

Now his soul was in her hand, again. She had a new husband, who was human, and kind. She didn’t want a life of war. She didn’t want that for her daughter. It had taken everything she had to subdue him, and still, she knew she’d only won because he wouldn’t kill her. He thought the game between them was the same as it had always been.

Hot tears fell down her face. The rain had stopped, but ash drifted and settled like snow. If a great tree couldn’t hold him, she didn’t know what else to do. Kira’s lightning had crackled around him, and she knew his cruel, beautiful, implacable wrath would be turned on them both, if she let him find strength again.

Without her own tails, Noshiko wouldn’t be able to tear enough energy from the earth to live longer than a human, even in this town where the currents of magic flowed like a riptide. It was just as well. She would be buried next to her second husband, her second in nine hundred years. She had no desire to outlive her first any longer than that. “I have a good life,” she whispered to him, in the muddy crater where her house used to be. “I am happy without you.” Her hand tightened around the fly, and crushed it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Traditional kitsune mythology says they sustain themselves by stealing life and energy from the world around them. It’s always easier for them to take energy of their own element type, but especially as they get older, they get better at using other sources. However, the stronger they are, the more energy they need to keep taking to survive, and the more they take, the more barren and destroyed their sources are afterward. TW writers have been quoted saying Noshiko is celestial type, but kitsune of any element can become celestial when they earn nine tails. Celestial types can take energy from anything, including sunlight, the ground, the air, pure magic, and people, especially magic users.
> 
> Let me know what you think about this idea! When I was watching 3b, I kept thinking how there was an untold story there, in the background, in the game and unspecified but familiar relationship between the nogitsune and Noshiko, and I wanted more compelling motivation than just capricious cruelty and mysterious obstructionism. I tried not to make this too exposition-y, but if anything so far is confusing, please ask!
> 
> ETA: whoops this was not a nice thing to post on Father's Day, sorry everyone D:


	15. Two Worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A sleepover! General warning: everybody’s traumatized but doing their best. I should probably make that a tag for the fic. 
> 
> While writing this, I learned that landlines DO still work when the power is out, but only if they have a cord. Cell towers usually have a few hours of battery back-ups, but that doesn’t help if they’re damaged.

It took a few tries, but Stiles got a call through to his dad as they stood at the edge of the darkened town. Kira’s phone had been lost and Lydia and Derek had no signal, so the rest of them stood around, a little shell-shocked, waiting, on edge, in what felt like unnatural quiet. “It’s almost like after I scream,” Lydia said. “Ringing silence after overwhelming sound.”

“The nearly as appalling and excessive silence,” Derek murmured. Lydia’s eye twitched, the barest wince. He caught it, though, and frowned a little, but she rolled her eyes, impatient with herself. Sometimes he forgot that Jenni—the darach had been their English teacher, between murders, that she was why they had read Heart of Darkness in the fall. Derek had more experience than most with having memories retroactively tainted by unspeakable horror, but with her, there had been a deadening buzz in his mind from the moment she’d first touched his hand in the boiler room until he’d opened his eyes in the hospital elevator weeks later, cheek stinging from a hard slap to the face, Stiles still panicking above him. Memories around her were like looking through wavy dark glass, distant, distorted. Maybe that was easier. It was hard to tell.

Stiles was pleading under his breath for his phone to connect. When it did, there was chaos and yelling in the background, tinny over the phone; it sounded like the Sheriff was still at the station. “Stiles? Is that you?”

“Yes! Dad, I’m okay, you’re—”

“Thank God, kid, I called the house, and I thought cell phones were—” The relief was just as palpable in the Sheriff’s distant voice through the speaker as it was from Stiles standing next to him, catching his breath even as they talked over each other.

“Dad, what hap—”

“Some kind of explosion in that new development off Willow Canyon, we don’t know yet, reports are still—”

“Should we come down to—”

“No! God, kid, stay home, stay safe. Who’s ‘we?’ Who do you have with you?”

“Uh,” his eyes darted around, and he hunched in a way that told Derek that the Sheriff didn’t even know he’d been out in the storm. “Lydia, Derek, and uh, Kira, Kira Yuk—”

“Der—Kira _Yukimura_? She’s okay? I’ll tell her dad, he’s here looking—”

“Yeah, she’s good—well not _good_ , she’s okay, she doesn’t want to go home, we have to—she was kidnapped, a little bit, but she’s okay. We’re at the Oak Creek mall, there should—it’s a crime scene. Special circumstance.”

There was a good five seconds of silence, then a weary, “God _damn_ it, Stiles.”

“Dad—”

“No, we’ll—just go home, I’ll say she’s in protective custody, we’ll sort it out later, get statements from everyone,” and coordinate a cover story for anything supernatural, he meant. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

Stiles hung up, closed his eyes, handed his phone off to Lydia, and breathed in and out, once. Then he pasted on a smile, relayed all the information he’d gotten, and finished with, “So! Party at my house? Power’s out, but I have a gas stove, we can cook something.”

“That’s what we were going to do anyway,” Lydia said, jabbing unsuccessfully at his phone. “I’ll need your landline, too. The tremors must have taken out a signal tower.”

Derek couldn’t quite meet his eyes. “Do you think I should—”

“Come with? _Yes_ ,” Stiles said. “Big strong werewolf, protect us, rawr.” Derek scowled at him, just a bit, but he would rather stay inside than find a tree near the Stilinski house to keep watch from anyway.

“Did you say _werewolf_?” Kira laughed, a little hysterically. “Wait. _Wait_. Is _that_ why—Scott’s one too, right?”

“Oh my god, I keep _telling_ him to stop sniffing like that,” Stiles said, dragging a palm down his face in secondhand embarrassment.

“And sometimes it takes four people to tackle him, and Greenburg told me he shot through the net so much last year that Coach increased the equipment budget,” she said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Derek muttered.

“Werewolves are real, boys are idiots, can we please leave the creepy abandoned mall,” Lydia suggested, and that was fair.

The drive to Stiles’s house was eerily hushed, even the sirens from every emergency vehicle in town muted by distance. Derek found himself stretching out his senses to the hearts and breath and life of the others in the car, the smoothly mechanical engine, searching for something like a sound he’d gotten accustomed to that stopped without warning, feeling strangely unmoored. Beacon Hills without power or stars was completely black, the kind of black where the roadside and the sky blended into a fathomless void. Brief stretches with emergency lighting, the passing headlights of other cars, and the faint flickering of candles glimpsed through windows were like floating islands in an infinite sea.

“I don’t know where Peter is,” Derek admitted quietly.

“Chris Argent has blue eyes too,” Stiles said, and—human eyes. Right. He was oddly reluctant to think Argent was capable of anything like this, but Stiles had made his point.

“So does Jackson,” Lydia sniffed from the front seat. “And Ethan and Aiden and _Isaac_. Really, a statistically improbable number of people we know.” She glanced back at Derek through the rearview mirror. “Don’t get me wrong. If it was Peter, I’m going to slice him into one-inch cubes, and if I’m feeling generous I’ll let him die before I’ve finished.”

 Stiles had a fond little smile aimed at the back of her head.

“That’s fair,” Derek said.

“Thanks, guys. I think.” Kira was somewhere between charmed and disturbed. “Who’s Peter?”

She was still shivering intermittently when they got to his house, so Stiles took her upstairs for a shower and change of clothes. Calls wouldn’t go through to Lydia’s house or Scott’s, so she gave up on the phone and investigated a cupboard with tea while Derek snooped around enough to get water boiling for pasta. He sniffed out a thick, dusty vanilla candle, lit it with the long-handled lighter in the drawer with grilling accoutrements, and turned his back before Lydia could say anything about it. Stiles came back down with a pair of basketball shorts for him to borrow while his jeans dried, and they took a few minutes to strategize.

When Kira appeared in a pair of Stiles’s soft sleep pants with the waist band rolled up and a t-shirt that was huge on her, Lydia handed her a cup of cocoa. Derek found a jar of tomato sauce that smelled okay, warmed it in a pan, put shredded mozzarella and parmesan on the counter.

Kira directed Lydia through a sketch of a man with slick blonde hair in a brown leather bomber jacket. Stiles sat and frowned at it like a piece to a jigsaw put in the wrong box, but when Derek nudged him, he shook his head, disturbed. “Well, some good news. This sure looks like a white guy,” he said to Kira, “so he’s definitely not your dad in any way. Just a terrible, delusional, dangerous man.” She managed a weak smile. There was another sketch, on a different sheet, of a fox with black fur, feet wreathed in shadows that Kira said moved like mist. Nobody knew what to make of that, either. When the Sheriff stopped by, he ate a bowl of pasta standing over the sink, then took their statements and the sketch of the suspect back to the station.

They had the werewolf talk over three pints of ice cream from the dark freezer, barely starting to melt, and Derek let Stiles manage that too, just shifting on request: claws, then fangs, then the full beta form. He was sitting in a chair, with Stiles and Lydia, there was candlelight and cocoa in the warm kitchen, and it was different in every way from when Allison saw him chained up on display in the basement, so he didn’t know why he was thinking about it, why he felt the proprietary ghost of gunpowdered fingers tracing his teeth.

“Your eyes—they glow blue?” Kira asked, and she seemed surprised by that, of all things, brow furrowing in innocent confusion. “Is it always blue? Does it change?”

“Yeah, they turn red if you’re an alpha, like Scott,” Stiles jumped in when Derek hesitated to answer. “Most wolves have a yellow glow. Blue happens when—” he stole a quick look at Derek “—when something really bad happens. I think it’s pretty, though.” Lydia rolled her eyes.

“Oh.” Kira was still confused. “It is,” she assured Derek. “So how do you—” whatever she had been about to say was broken off by a huge yawn.

“We can talk more in the morning,” Lydia said. “You should sleep, if you can.”

Stiles put Lydia and Kira in the guest bedroom for the night and came back downstairs as Derek was washing dishes. Derek braced himself for—he didn’t know what, Stiles had already asked him to stay, but he was still feeling something like the afterimages of tiny shocks beneath his skin, across his nerves, that had been haunting him since he ran out into the storm. Instead, Stiles shoved at his shoulder until he turned in place, and planted his forehead in Derek’s neck. “Okay?” he asked, muffled, tense, but Derek had been having more and more trouble putting words together all evening, so his arms came up and settled hesitantly around Stiles in answer, and tightened gradually, as Stiles made no move to leave. They stayed there for a long time, holding each other up, until neither of them were shaking.

~~~

The couch smelled mostly like Stiles and his dad, and Derek could hear everybody’s breathing and heartbeats upstairs, so the night passed okay, even with the deep-woods stillness of a town without the usual background hum of electricity in the wires and TVs on in every third house. He read. Kira woke up a few times, but Lydia was there with her, and he didn’t listen in. The Sheriff came home again in the early hours looking worn and serious, and they had a slow, awkward conversation in the living room until Derek heard Stiles slipping into restless wakefulness and John went upstairs to check on him before heading back to the station.

Stiles hadn’t slept all that much, but it was more than usual, and he said he’d rather hang out downstairs. He sprawled out on the couch and drank coffee, feet over the armrest, leaning into Derek, listening to the emergency radio in the muted light of the cloudy dawn. Derek closed his eyes for a few hours of rest that was almost as good as sleep.

When the girls began stirring upstairs, it was raining again, softly, and he got Stiles to help with eggs, pancakes, and a passable fruit salad while they argued about whether it was excessive to put chocolate chips in the batter and Nutella on top. Predictably, Stiles grabbed the first one off the griddle, shaking off the heat from his fingertips as chocolate melted everywhere. 

“You have been holding out on me, man, I had no idea you could cook,” he said, chocolate hazelnut dripping down his chin, hands, _arms_ from a pancake rolled up like a burrito. Derek paid very careful attention to the next round on the griddle. He couldn’t watch Stiles eat this early. His defenses were too low.

“I can’t. Just breakfast. Some stovetop stuff,” he grumbled, watching bubbles rise and pop in the batter. “Our oven was shit.” His jaw cracked in a yawn.

“What, really? Your whole kitchen looks like it was super fancy,” Stiles said, confused, and how would—oh.

“In New York,” Derek said. He glared at a pancake and jabbed at it with a heat-warped plastic spatula, even though it wasn’t ready to flip.

“Oh. Sorry, yeah, that makes more sense,” Stiles said, suddenly beside him. “That one’s not done, stop poking it.”

“Sit,” Derek growled. Having to cook and talk and not lean on Stiles all at the same time was cruel and unusual, when he just woke up.

Stiles snapped his teeth mockingly, and smiled at him, which just made it worse. He put his hands up, like Derek would ever believe he was innocent. “Okay, alright, no backseat flipping. For a minute there, you had me tricked into thinking you might be a morning person.” He backed off, stealing Derek’s coffee, smirking at his retaliatory flash of claws.

Derek flipped a little one in the griddle’s hot spot, and a few more, while Stiles started another batch, slowly dripping water heated on the stove through a filter full of grounds. “I had to learn,” he said. “Laura was a morning person.” She hadn’t been before the fire, but it had left her with her own issues, her own way of coping, and the alpha power driving her to run crosshatching paths around Brooklyn, again and again.

“Sounds miserable,” Stiles said.

When Derek never slept on a regular schedule, breakfast together was a way to demarcate a new day. If he cooked, it counted as real food, and he could curl up in the blankets again after. “Sometimes,” he said. He poured out the last of the batter as Kira shuffled into the kitchen.

Stiles put a new cup of coffee by his elbow, half skim milk, with too much imitation vanilla extract and offensive chemical sugar substitute and unappealing clumps of cinnamon powder floating on top. It was… not good, _objectively_ not good, but Derek had never even tried to replicate his order from the coffee shop, so it was also kind of a revelation. He drank it all, anyway.

The power was still off, so after breakfast, there was nothing much to do but schoolwork, research, or sit around and talk. It was Saturday morning and Kira had a lot of questions, so it wasn’t surprising that the latter won out.

“No, I’m pretty much human,” Stiles told her. “Little bit of magic stuff, but it’s not like Harry Potter, we’re all disappointed. _Lydia_ is a banshee, which is very special. She’s how we found you.”

“What?” Kira went from confused to sort of terrified as she belatedly realized that her whole rescue was actually a minor miracle. “How _did_ you find me?” The official story was that she had Find My Friends active on her phone, and Lydia had checked it and been worried.

“Banshees have an extra sense for events that cause ripples outside our world,” Derek explained.

“What,” Kira said.

“And death, she finds dead people,” Stiles added.

“ _Like_ death,” Derek corrected.

“ _What_ ,” Kira said.

“Really,” Lydia asked.

They were all staring at him. “Um.” He scratched at his beard. “Okay. This is the way it was explained to me. I don’t know if it’s true,” he cautioned, “But. It seems to be.” The authors of _Semicorporeal Species_ supported it, anyway. And he’d talked to the echo of his mother, dead for seven years. There was a limit to how skeptical he could be against that. He cleared his throat. “There are many worlds.” Stiles scoffed a little, and Derek scowled at him. “ _Many worlds_ ,” he repeated, louder. “Two of these, our physical world and the spirit world, exist parallel to each other, very close, rarely touching.” He held up his hands, palms flat, an inch apart. “People exist as… a tether, between the two worlds. Our bodies are an anchor for our souls.” He bent one finger toward his other hand to represent the tenuous connection. They stared at him some more. Stiles flexed his own hands and tried to copy him, frowning, while Kira glanced at him and Lydia to gauge their reactions. He let his hands fall back to the table, missing his Aunt Olivia, her patience and eloquence and the smell of ink.

“So, with this rigorously scientific model of the universe, a banshee can detect perturbation in the, what, psycho-supernatural firmament?” Lydia said.

“Sure,” he agreed amiably. Her furious glare was predictably satisfying, and he showed some teeth.

“What about you? Us?” Kira asked uncertainly, “Do we have normal souls? Human ones?”

“Not human ones, but yes, of course. Werewolves and other shapeshifters just have a more malleable tether; our bodies can change, but our souls don’t. The pull of the moon is magic rooted in the physical world, but the tether goes both ways. That’s why we can control it, if our souls are strong enough, secure,” he said.

“Anchored,” Stiles said, staring into the middle distance while he worried at a hangnail, and Derek nodded.

“Kitsune don’t shift, but it’s the same idea,” he went on. “You still have a soul, you’re still a person – just a little different, with your own abilities, like how you survived the lightning. You’ll be able to absorb it, channel it, someday.”

Kira looked down at the table. “A little different. Right.”

“We all are,” Lydia said, not unkindly.

“When you—when someone dies,” Stiles started, flat, but trailed off. He was focused inward, pale and still.

“The tether snaps,” Derek said cautiously. “The rebound makes ripples.”

Stiles’s eyes dragged over toward Derek. “Body dies, soul floats loose,” he said, detached.

“To be reborn, some say, unless they can escape the cycle,” Derek confirmed. “But you—that’s not you, that’s not what happened. Lydia was your anchor. You came back.”

“ _What_ ,” Kira whispered.

“Long story,” Lydia said.

Kira’s eyes went wide. “ _Bardo_ ,” she said accusingly. “He—they _died_?”

“A little bit,” she admitted. “He’s _fine_ now,” she directed at Stiles, louder, but he was trapped in his own mind, gaze unseeing, fixed in Derek’s direction.

“What about dreams,” Stiles said. “When you saw your mom—you said it was like a dream state. Could you, you know. Walk around the spirit world. In your sleep. Open other doors.” His face twisted. “Get eaten by a tree stump.” His eyes slid toward the sketch of the fox abandoned on the counter, as if of their own volition, and darted away.

“Most people can’t see into or interact with the spirit world around them, outside their own minds,” Derek said slowly, “But. Dream walkers are a popular myth for a reason.” He wished he could fix this, pull him back, reassure him without lying. “I don’t know—I saw the Nemeton in the loft, in my—I don’t remember the doors. I don’t know enough about it, or what happened to you, but it doesn’t—It’s a _tree_ ,” he said helplessly. “Magic, sure, but… a _tree_.”

“Says the _werewolf_ ,” Lydia said. “Wait.” She held up her hands, staring intently at the table. “Wait.” She closed her eyes, and Derek automatically tuned his senses to the perimeter of the house, looking for threats; she had the same expression for thinking about math puzzles and listening outside the world. On opening, her eyes snapped to Derek’s, then flicked to Stiles and Kira. “This doesn’t mean I subscribe to your spirit world theory. But it’s not just a tree. Scott and Allison saw it too, that day, in the white room, when they—during the sacrifice. Stiles still dreams it. _You_ saw it. I draw it _all the time_ ; it’s always there, in the back of my mind, if I don’t focus on something else. We _know_ it has psychic abilities.” Kira looked like she wanted to disagree, or ask more questions, but didn’t interrupt. “So. Speculation,” Lydia continued. “We’ve been assuming that the tree’s influence is random, undirected, like an environmental hazard for those susceptible, but maybe it’s not. Maybe there’s a consciousness of some sort, a drive, with desires. I hadn’t thought about it before, for _obvious_ reasons, but maybe the tree is… a really strong tether, between this world and another, warping the… spirit dimension around it, for lack of a better term. Like a singularity.” She looked around the table. “Maybe it has a soul.”

“This is not the kind of stuff I thought you guys were doing in Conservancy Club,” Kira said contemplatively.

“Ancient gods and oak trees,” Stiles murmured, leg jittering, shaking the table. “Ancient gods _in_ oak trees.”

“Ancient _gods_ ,” Kira repeated dubiously.

“The bestiary has dryads, kodama, Phrai Tani—” Lydia started.

“Those are all just tree spirits of different species, Derek broke in. “It’s not—those are _minor_ fae, and we would have _met_ them, if the Nemeton had one—”

“Not a normal tree, though, is it,” Stiles said, thinking out loud while Derek and Lydia went back and forth. “Super tree, super spirit—”

“—Do you meet a _lot_ of tree spirits, Derek? Dryads out in the preserve?” she asked sarcastically.

“Yes, obviously, they’re _dicks_ , but they—”

“—Wait, we _do_ have dryads here? Are you _serious_?”

“Why _wouldn’t_ we?” he bit out.

“Why—Derek, you need to _tell us_ these things!”

“How am I supposed to know you _didn’t_ know?” He glared at her. “I’m sure they’re in the Argent bestiary, why wouldn’t you—There was one on your _porch_!” Her face cycled through a myriad of emotions, from frustration to denial to suspicion to startled realization to—

“Okay!” Kira shouted, and they paused. “So, I don’t really know what’s going on, but I feel like we got sidetracked. Is there seriously a tree in the woods that might be, like, an evil deity? Like _C’thulu_? If you’re joking, it’s not funny, and you should tell me now,” she said. Reluctantly, she added, “It doesn’t seem like you’re joking.”

“Not like C’thulu,” Derek said. “ _Other_ nemetons aren’t evil.”

“Neither is C’thulu,” Stiles argued, fingernails picking at his cuticles. “Just so incomprehensible its proximity causes madness, which hey, what do you know.” He tapped a finger against his forehead, lip quirked sardonically.

“Maybe that’s why they cut it down,” Lydia suggested. “Maybe we were wrong about there being a contaminant; having a soul doesn’t mean it’s a _good_ soul – we could have the tree version of… darach _means_ dark oak. A demon tree.”

That seemed to snap a last barrier inside Stiles, and the thought he’d been fighting so hard not to acknowledge spilled out into the air. “Hey, so, a maybe-sentient _demon_ tree with a direct line to my brain, that’s cool. Do you think an exorcism will work on that? Maybe we can track down a priest like _today_.”

With a look of horror, Lydia’s hand snapped out to his arm, and her nails dug in. “ _No_ , Stiles,” she said. “No, it’s just—It’s just nightmares. You’re just _sleepwalking_.”

“You know it’s more than that,” he said. He tapped his fingers to the table, one-two-three-four-five.

“Derek, _tell_ him it’s not,” Lydia demanded. “He’s not _possessed_.”

Derek was frozen, trapped in the memory of a cruel smirk, a finger against his lips, a strange heartbeat, the _wrongness_. His claws were suddenly digging into his thigh.

“Deaton will know,” he said instead. “He’ll help.”

“He hates both of us,” Stiles objected weakly.

“He’ll help with this.” He had to. Parasitic spirits tormenting high schoolers had no place in any balance worth keeping.

A loud knock sounded at the door, startling everybody.

Lydia frowned at Derek, who shook his head, disturbed. He pointed at Stiles and the chalked lines over his front door, but Stiles shrugged uncomfortably, so Derek wasn’t sure what exactly the runes were for or how they worked. Intent mattered. He pointed at Lydia and Kira and directed them off to the side of the foyer, so they would be hidden from the door. Lydia nodded and took Kira’s hand. Stiles waved at himself and pointed at Derek to indicate he’d go with. Derek splayed his fingers to tell him to stay back, at least a little. Stiles rolled his eyes, but didn’t argue, so he probably would. The whole exchange only took a few seconds, and then they all stood and Derek went to answer the door.

A slight Japanese woman in an asymmetrical black moto jacket stood on the other side. Her eyes narrowed. “Derek Hale. I should have known,” she said dispassionately. “What have you done?”

There was a faint tap of Lydia’s fingernails on a phone screen. “Still no reception,” she whispered, barely loud enough for his wolf ears. “Back in a second.” Her bare feet whispered up the stairs toward Stiles’s room.

He bowed, slightly deeper than a normal _eshaku_ , out of respect. “Mrs. Yukimura,” he greeted. Her lips pursed, and she barely inclined her head in return. He heard Kira take half a step forward, but stop. “You’ll have to be more specific,” he said carefully; “I do a lot of things.” He felt Stiles’s breath of a laugh behind him.

“So you do remember me. Then there is no need for pretense. Return my daughter to me, and I will ask only this: did you serve willingly?”

He didn’t turn his head toward Kira, but her face from the night before was clear in his memory, her confusion, her fear, her uncertainty about how much her mother knew. She stayed where she was. He crossed his arms. Nine tails, he remembered, even though Mrs. Yukimura’s aura was hidden; there was no way he would survive a fight. The only thing that might be holding her back was reluctance to level the house without knowing Kira was out of the way. “She’s not going anywhere until she wants to,” he said evenly. “I serve no one.”

The telltale thump of the witch bag hitting the rug was accompanied by the scrape of Lydia unscrewing the bottle of mountain ash. Derek felt Stiles step up behind him and lean on his shoulder. There was an extra bat in the umbrella stand by the door. “Hey, Mrs. Yukimura,” he said with false brightness. “I don’t think we’ve met; I’m Stiles. Crazy storm last night, huh?”

Noshiko’s face, for a moment, was twisted by grief, and she levelled a look at him like she could burn the flesh from his bones. But she probably could, Derek knew. She could, yet she wasn’t. He risked a glance at the glyphs above the door; they were glowing slightly, pale and silver.

“Do not mock me,” she said to Stiles coldly. “If you harmed her, I will tear the spark from your soul.”

“I’d tear the heart from your chest,” Derek snapped, with a half-step forward, but even through the sharp spike of fear, Stiles was holding him back.

“Whoa, whoa, hey, how about no tearing, okay? Nobody tears anything, let’s try that. Hearts and sparks stay put all around,” Stiles said.

Kira peeked out at her from around Derek’s other shoulder. “What the hell, mom? Don’t _threaten_ my friends!”

“Kira,” she said, with a flash of open relief. “You are safe now, you can come with me.” Kira said nothing, but took a half step back. “He’s gone,” her mother reassured her. “He’s dead.”

“Hold up,” Stiles said, “You’re _very_ sure of that.”

“She feels like recent death,” Lydia said, still behind them with the mountain ash.

“I killed him,” Noshiko said. There were a few seconds of silence.

Derek cocked his head at her, but her heart had been steady; she could disguise it, but she had no reason to lie. He nodded minutely.

“Huh,” Stiles said. “If you want to make this really easy for the police, _who_ , exactly did you kill? You’re sure it was the same guy?”

“He said he was my _dad_.” Kira’s voice almost broke, but it was accusing, too.

“You know your father. Never think that you don’t,” Noshiko told her fiercely, ignoring Stiles. “He is nothing to either of us now.”

“‘Either,’ ‘now,’” Lydia noted.

“ _Mom_.”

“I knew him,” she admitted. “A long time ago, I knew him. He knew you were my daughter, and he was watching us. He knew the storm was calling you. He used you for his own power.”

“He was—like us?” Kira asked, hesitant.

“ _Not_ like us. Not like you,” her mother assured her.

“You said to trust the fox, I followed one and he was—”

“A trick, a mirage, he’s always—he may have heard me say it. I meant your own fox, the fox half of your soul. I didn’t know you were in danger, or I would have—he escaped his prison, and I didn’t know. I would have killed him sooner.”  

Kira nudged past Derek to wrap her mother in a hug. Stiles and Derek looked away, and not at each other. “I’m kind of freaked out that you murdered someone, Mom.”

“I had to.” Her eyes flicked to the side, as if embarrassed. “Your father said to tell you that I won’t make a habit of it.”

Kira wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, above a watery smile. “Well. Thanks. I’m glad you’re okay too.”

“Of course.” Noshiko held her close, a little awkwardly. “I used to be a samurai’s wife, you know,” she said, with a small, sad smile.  

Kira choked on a wet laugh. “Oh my god, I always thought that was a _joke_ , but it’s not, is it? You’ve really been alive for a thousand years.”

“Close enough.” She pulled back from the hug to cup Kira’s face. “I am sorry you were hurt,” she said. She turned to the three still in the doorway. “He was rot in the heart of the tree,” she told them. “Be wary of what you’ve awakened. The scars may never heal.”

Stiles put a hand to his chest. “What,” he said faintly. “Are you serious?”  She nodded.

Lydia put it together a second after Stiles did. “The fucking creep who kidnapped Kira was the contaminant,” she said.

Which meant—Derek put an arm out to steady Stiles as his chemosignals went haywire. “The _tree_ was possessed,” Stiles said. “Oh, fucking _fuck_.”

Noshiko was ignoring the effect of her warning, maybe out of politeness. “If you wish to stay here, you may,” she told Kira. “I just wanted to be sure you were alright.”

“For a little bit,” Kira said. “I’ll come home for dinner.”

“No, your father and I are staying at the Sheraton downtown, go there. I’ll leave a keycard for you at the front desk.”

“What? Why? You think it’ll be that long before the power comes back?”

Noshiko’s face went back to being unreadable. “He found me at home,” she finally said. “They’re saying it looks like a gas pipe exploded. The house is rubble.”

Kira squinted at her. “You’re not joking.” She rubbed a hand over her face. “Mom, that’s all our _stuff_! What are we going to do? My clothes and books and—your _pottery_ collection, you said those were—”

“It’s just stuff,” Noshiko interrupted gently. “It’s just things. They can all be replaced. Not you.”

Kira sighed, and hugged her again. “The Sheraton?” she checked. 

“By seven,” her mother said.

Noshiko looked back at Derek, took in Stiles and Lydia still on the floor. “I bear you no enmity,” she said. “I… appreciate your assisting Kira.” She bowed, stiff and proper, and turned to leave. 

They all exchanged looks as Noshiko got in her Prius and drove away. “Okay. I’m done,” Kira said finally. “This has been the weirdest day.”

“Top ten, definitely,” Stiles agreed tiredly. She eyed him askance.

“Well, some good news, at least,” Lydia said. Faced with their incredulity, she ticked off points on her fingers. “The tree isn’t inherently evil. The evil thing is dead. Nobody _else_ is dead. Nobody’s _possessed_. Kira doesn’t have to be afraid of being kidnapped again. She _does_ need a whole new wardrobe, which means we don’t even need an excuse to borrow Allison and go shopping.” She patted Stiles on the shoulder. “I think we can call this a win.”

“Shopping?” Kira sounded ambivalent, but Lydia had a glint in her eye that meant there was no escape.

“A _whole wardrobe_ ,” she said ominously. “Smoothies. _Manicures_.”

Kira bit her lip and glanced in the direction her mom had left. A telltale shine was gathering in the corners of her eyes. “That sounds really nice,” she admitted.

Stiles’s smile was a little crooked, but it was there.

Derek knew Lydia was right, that they should take the victory and be glad, but part of him couldn’t help but worry about the next thing to inevitably go wrong. _Be wary of what you’ve awakened._ He felt the growing itch between his shoulder blades to run a patrol, but he didn’t want to leave Stiles alone until—Stiles wouldn’t want to be alone.

“Have fun with that,” Stiles said to Lydia. “I’m going to do _nothing_. Take the rest of the day off. I’ve got—” he broke off in a frustrated groan. “Argh, the _power_ , I can’t even watch movies, this is the worst.”

“I have a generator at the loft,” Derek offered. Stiles perked up immediately, flashed him a sunny smile.

“Fuck _yeah_ , you do. Let me leave my dad a note.” He scrambled off, looking happier.

Lydia gave Derek a look. “I will,” he promised her. “We’ll be okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> End of Part 1! Once upon a time I thought this fic would probably end up around 60k. At this point we’re… uh… half done? At least half done. This was originally going to be two chapters but I didn’t really like the break, SO you get a giant chapter this week but heads up it may be a bit before I can update again. 
> 
> If you want to know more about the dryad on Lydia’s porch, check out [Kyle Wei, Tree Whisperer](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1412827) by magneticwave :D


	16. Tea and Bones

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: brief thought of self-harm in paragraph two, minor panic in non-POV character near the end, general sad Derek.

Derek remembers coming home from school or practice or running in the woods to find Alpha Ito and his mother drinking tea in the sitting room or the kitchen or the library, sometimes with cookies. It was always the same terrible-smelling tea and he knew they both loved it, but he didn’t know where it was from, and maybe it wasn’t his place. There was an old hippie community in Greenwood, though, with a tea store there. Derek stood in front of a colorful wall of tins and delicate cups and elaborate labels that were not at all descriptive and the only other patrons, two elderly ladies with complimentary purses, gave him a wide berth. _Gunpowder_ was definitely not a real flavor, and neither was _dragon_. Wasn’t jasmine toxic? Maybe that was just yellow jasmine. He stuffed his hands in his jacket pockets and tried to tease the scents apart. As the old couple shuffled to the register, he reached out hesitantly, frowned at a light blue tin chased with flowers, put it back down. Another wall had books about tea, but they weren’t helping him now. Sculpted bonsai trees in little dishes crowded onto a long table by the window; maybe one of those would be a better idea—but no, that didn’t feel right. A tree was a responsibility, a gift that needed constant tending for years afterward. Tea was something to be shared together, enjoyed, to foster a relationship.

He wondered if Stiles liked tea. He wondered if there was a subtle way to break some of his own fingers without anybody noticing.

The sole employee had wandered over from the counter to pretend to fuss over the bonsai. She cleared her throat, and the long amethyst crystals of her earrings caught the light. “Can I… is there anything in particular you’re looking for?” she ventured.

He took a breath, tried to summon a smile. It felt like more of a grimace. “A gift,” he said.

“Oh!” She stepped closer. “Mother? Sister?” she guessed, then, slyly, “Girlfriend?”

 _Kind of heteronormative!_ he could imagine Stiles saying. “Family friend,” he went with. “She just lost—somebody close to her.” Her beta, Jason McKellon, had been host to the thing that captured Kira and went after her mom; the poster declaring him missing was a solid match to the sketch, which luckily no one in the station had noticed before Stiles surreptitiously tore it down. Young guy, loving family, baby on the way, the Sheriff had said, and Derek tried not to think about how a void creature would feed on pain. “She and my mother used to drink this… mushroom tea. Together. Reishi. But…” he did grimace, then, apologetic.

But she smiled at him, and nodded encouragingly. Her flowing shirt had tiny embroidered cats on a faded cream background, like antique paper. “You want to share with her, that’s a nice gesture. Mushroom teas are usually on the musky side, not for everybody. We could try to find something similar? In the same family, maybe. Dark teas, black, earthy, smoky—”

“No,” he broke in. “No, not—maybe something different.”

“Ah,” she said after a beat, and her earrings jangled as he stared at the wall of teas again. “I could show you what’s popular,” she offered.

That wouldn’t be right either, to take the easy way out. “It should be special,” he said. “She’s—I have a lot of respect for her.” Not just because she was over a hundred years old; Satomi had found Cora in the woods, after the fire, and spirited her to safety while Laura and Derek were running scared, too afraid of who might be chasing to risk contact with anyone they knew. Laura hadn’t even stopped at Josh’s apartment in town, just went to the vault, bought clothes and a duffel bag before cutting up the credit cards, Derek uselessly vacant and shaking in the passenger seat of the family Range Rover until they dumped it in Oregon, the screaming pain in their chests overwhelming from all the pack bonds severed. Satomi had protected her, where he and Laura had failed. “It has to be—” there was no gift that could ever express that kind of gratitude or make up for the awful news he was bringing, but he wanted this to be—a step. A sign. “Something interesting, unusual, but not too processed, nothing artificial. None of the,” he mimed the hand-rolling that seemed needlessly complicated and probably exploitative, with the distractingly strong hand-scents of strangers. “It’s… important,” he finished.

“Aha,” she said, and he tried not to read too much into the air of surprise. “An oolong, maybe, or perhaps… no, reishi is uncaffeinated, what about a rooibos? Yes! We could make a blend,” she said, bouncing on her toes a little with growing excitement.

His eyes darted around the store, marking the exits. “I’m sure you’re busy, but if there was any way—if I could just smell a few, maybe, I think I could—”

“There’s nobody else here,” she pointed out guilelessly. “Let’s brew some samples!” She grinned up at him, bustled over to the counter and its row of stools, and ducked behind it to start lining up neatly labelled tins of loose-leaf and white ceramic pots, humming a little. When she started popping them open, Derek took a reluctant step in her direction, and another. He knew peonies were safe to eat, and that one smelled alright.

An hour later, the passenger seat of the Camaro had a bag of decorative tins and a packet of loopy handwriting to describe the blend in each. He stopped for a burger and slice of pie at a diner he and Stiles had gone to still stinking like swamp mud after a night running around looking for a kelpie.

He and Cora had met with Satomi for dinner, before they left in the fall, but not at her house, and Satomi was old-fashioned, anyway, at least half from paranoia; Cora sent letters to a P.O. box, and Satomi didn’t carry a phone. There was a fountain at the center crossroads of Hill Valley – dry now, for some reason, with brown iron stains in the basin. He settled in on a bench with a book, pretending to read between glances at the shuttered storefronts and people hurrying down the sidewalk with their heads down. He keyed up his hearing rather than look over his shoulder. There was an itch behind his teeth.

The man who finally came for him was a stranger, but the Ito pack was big, and he’d only met a few of them. He was tall, with weathered brown skin, eyes flinty and muscles tense as he dropped onto the bench beside Derek. “State your business,” he said.

Derek sat back, went blank instead of bristling. “Social.”

The man’s face twisted unhappily. Derek waited.

“It’s not a good time. I hope you didn’t come far.”

Derek barely managed to suppress a sigh. “Beacon Hills. Derek Hale.”

The tight lines of his mouth barely eased. “Alright. Good to meet you. I’m Samnang.”

Derek nodded in acknowledgement. “I could come back tomorrow,” he offered, since he did actually mean well, even if he brought bad news.

Samnang cast a look around the hushed square and rubbed his hand over his face. “No, she’ll probably—I might as well take you up and see.” Samnang jerked his head down the street, back toward the car he’d pulled up in, and Derek followed him toward it. “Is this at all related to that power outage?”

“I heard the sheriff’s department call it a gas main explosion,” Derek said, which got a snort in return.

“There aren’t gas lines that far up in the hills,” Samnang said.

Derek shrugged. Craters were harder to explain away than slashed-up corpses, sometimes. “I’ve been meaning to stop by anyway,” he admitted. “And. I’ve heard about your missing persons.”

Samnang looked away, and his scent washed with fresh sadness. “Ah. Yeah,” he said wearily. “There’s a vigil later, for Jason.” Even if the authorities never declared him dead, the pack still felt it. They knew.

Alpha Ito’s house was mostly wood and windows, open floor plan, courtyard in the center. It wasn’t as dense with overlaying scents as his house had been growing up, but something about it still felt warm, despite the lingering air of anxious grief. The faintest trace of reishi. His mother had been here, he realized. It was suddenly hard to breathe. She’d stood on these tiles, touched these walls. It was true for all of Beacon Hills, every inch, but—this was new to him, even as it was probably exactly as it was seven years ago, ten, twenty. Laura might have been here too, in training, walked under the same bleached and gnarled sycamores, their shed bark hanging like tattered skin on skeletal fingers reaching up from the earth. Satomi was the same too, short, strong, with fine, spider’s web wrinkles. She met them at the entryway, returned Derek’s polite bow, and dismissed Samnang with a hand on his shoulder in benediction. “Derek,” she said, “I hope you’re well.” She seemed reserved, almost cautious, but Derek thought he understood.

“You too, Alpha Ito. I know this is… a hard time. I brought. Tea.” He handed over the tin, sort of shoved it at her, not letting himself hesitate. The action made it real in a way that hadn’t quite sunk in, yet, and he felt like such a _fraud_ , standing before someone who would know exactly how he failed to measure up to anyone who should be there instead. He couldn’t quite meet her eyes. “It’s—I don’t know anything about tea,” he said. “So. I hope it’s okay.”

“Every cup is different,” she said gently, too gently, after studying his face. “We’ll have to try it and see.” She turned away, and he heard an electric kettle being filled and set as he untied his shoes, set them aside neatly by her small, practical collection lined up by the step. He stayed on the floor and took a few deep breaths, gritted his teeth, appreciated the fiction of privacy. There were soft slippers for guests, so he eventually found a pair that fit and whispered over the polished wood floor to join Alpha Ito in the kitchen. “You should call me Satomi,” she said, not looking at him, busy heating water and preparing a tea set. “After all, you’ve become an alpha too.”

He couldn’t stop the huff of a laugh. “Such as I was,” he said, but she rolled her eyes.

“Nobody knows everything, when they’re just starting out,” she said. She shook the tin in her hand and popped off the lid, breathing deeply. “Now. Tell me about this tea.”

A short, traditional chabudai was set overlooking a trickle of water in a riverbed shaded by valley oak and redbud, and they moved there when the tea was ready. They knelt on floor cushions, tray on the low table between them. It didn’t take long for the conversation to turn to what had finally spurred Derek to visit.

“You’ve been here for a long time,” he said to Satomi, fishing for where to start. “Were you ever acquainted with Noshiko Yukimura?”

Satomi had remarkable control over herself, both her face and the chemosignals that came with emotion, but there was a flash of a twitch, a tightening, that seemed out of place in her expression of polite curiosity. “I didn’t know that she had returned.”

“Yes. A few months ago, with her husband and daughter.”

Satomi closed her eyes. “A daughter,” she repeated. “How old?”

“She manifested on Friday, during the storm,” Derek said, answering her real question. “Lightning. It was… forced.”

“You found Jason,” Satomi guessed, like she’d known where that piece fit and had only been waiting for the puzzle to form around it.

Derek paused. “You knew about the nogitsune,” he realized. He had been dreading her shock, the added grief, but he’d been braced for it—not this resignation.

Satomi sighed and looked away, over the still valley. “In my foolish youth, I saw a creature of the void walk the earth in the skin of a man I’d killed in anger. I recognized the shape of its soul.”

It sounded like there was a story there, but Derek couldn’t get past— “You _knew_.”

“It’s haunted me for decades,” she said. “In dreams and visions. Whispers. Until last year, with the dark druid, and the deaths in the woods.”

“Your pack—”

“They know. We meditate often. It is a demon that feeds on turmoil, you see, internal and external. We walk the Noble Eightfold Path. With right thought and mastery of emotion and desire, though it may touch our minds, it finds nothing to sustain it.”

Derek didn’t think there were words to express his incredulity. “You could have asked for help,” he said.

“Help with what? Killing it? Even if it were possible, that is not the Path. If we abandon our principles in favor of violence, we betray our own souls. No. We must be steadfast.”

“I just—I don’t understand how you could sit back and try to _meditate_ your way to beating this thing.”

“We meditate toward the only goal that matters,” she said. “Not victory. Peace.” Derek shook his head. An impossible goal if he’d ever heard one, and there was no shortage of pain in the world. You could never starve a creature that fed on misery. Satomi leaned forward, eyes intent. “The nogitsune deserves our pity, Derek. As a creature of insatiable craving, it is also a creature of endless, incomparable suffering.” In Buddhist thought, cessation of desire was the path to salvation. Derek could see how infinite, rapacious hunger would be a roadblock.

“I can’t pity a thing that hurts people on purpose,” he said flatly. “It _torments_ people. It _controls_ them. Your beta’s _dead_.”  

“I’m very well aware of how many people we have lost,” she snapped, but closed her eyes for a second and was calm again. “What is right is not often easy. Anger cannot be used against it, only turned to its service.” Satomi’s right hand flexed absently while Derek frowned. “Do you know if he died as himself,” she asked, “Jason.”

He sat back, reminded of where he was, who he was talking to. “I don’t,” Derek said. “She didn’t say anything, except that it was dead. We didn’t know the host was Jason until we saw his poster, and I didn’t know he was a wolf until I caught his scent.” That had been his Saturday night, after bringing Stiles to the station with dinner for the Sheriff: up and down all the stairwells in the dead mall, piecing apart the traces of the deputies and dust from the faint trail of a Kira and ozone and a strange wolf underlaid by tar.

But Satomi was frowning at him. “She killed him?”

“I think she had to, since it was using his body,” Derek said, and belatedly castigated himself for being callous.

“No, not Jason,” she said impatiently, “She killed the nogitsune?”

Derek blinked. “That’s what she said,” he confirmed warily.

Satomi contemplated for a moment. “Well. Perhaps it has been too long since I’ve had tea with Noshiko.”

“Its death seems worth celebrating, to me. At least it can’t hurt anybody else.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Not directly, anyway. The touch of the void is not the kind of infection easily cured.” Derek thought of the three teenagers with black scars on their hearts, hallucinating, awake at all hours, terrified for weeks, months, though Stiles, at least, seemed to finally be getting better. “We will hold a vigil,” she decided, “and meditate. You’re welcome to join us.”

Derek didn’t let his eyes dart toward the door, but her eyebrows quirked at him like she’d seen it anyway. “I am honored by the invitation,” he said.

“It might do you well to meditate. You look tired.”

He shrugged uncomfortably. “I’ve taken up yoga.”

Satomi smiled a little. “Ah yes, Cora tells me that you do handstands together on Skype.”

“That was her idea,” he defended, though he couldn’t remember who had made it a competition. Erica and Boyd had been laughing in the background at how red their faces got, but he’d won. He looked down at the empty cup turning in his hand, studied the delicate crackled glaze of deep red and white porcelain. “I should have known what was in the Nemeton. It’s on my territory—it’s my responsibility.”

Satomi nodded somberly. “I don’t know what it would have changed, but I had assumed you were aware. You and Laura were both so young when we lost Talia, but even if she never told Peter, her emissary should have warned you when you came back.”

Derek carefully set the cup on the table when his hand tightened involuntarily. “We don’t get along,” he said. “So, if there’s anything else you can think of that someone should have told me, maybe you can just make sure.” Not that there was much he could do. Leave a record, at least. Tell Stiles. “Or Scott. I could tell Scott. The True Alpha.”

“Hmm,” she said. “In some places, they’re called ‘Chosen’ Alphas. New alpha sparks have to come from somewhere, or our numbers would only diminish over time, with alphas dying packless or killing each other.”

It seemed like a difference in semantics, to Derek. “Chosen by who? Fate?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it.” She poured him another cup of tea. “Have you been having any trouble with skeletal constructs?”

“With… what? Have you?”

~~~

It was dark by the time another of Satomi’s betas brought him back to the Camaro. He sat with his hands on the wheel for a while, staring at the barely-worn leather, rubbing his thumb over a bloodstain that hadn’t quite come out. The buzzing of his phone snapped him out of it, rattling against the console with a text alert. When he’d gotten away of Beacon Hills that morning and in range of an undamaged cell tower, a text had come in from Erica, undelivered since Friday night: just a question mark. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, so he’d sent one back. Stiles, on the other hand, had been spamming him the entire time he’d been Hill Valley.

_Hey we have cell phones again_

_Hey_

_Hey_

_Hey Derek_

_Derek_

_I know you charged it_

_Hey_

So, pretty standard, at least until three hours later, when there was, _If I don’t hear from you tonight I’ll assume you need a rescue_. Not quite implying that he _knew_ where Derek was, because that would be evidence of the GPS monitoring he still thought was a secret. Derek rolled his eyes a little, but he couldn’t deny it was kind of nice to have someone keeping track.

The smile dropped off his face as he caught up on the flurry of recent text messages in a group chat, mostly between Isaac and Stiles.

 _So this is in my old bkyard_ , Isaac had sent, with a picture of a white circle of glyphs, like the one in the underpass but less messy. _Smells like blood_. Derek swore; he rarely patrolled that street, since no pack members lived there anymore, and the impression of Isaac’s fear and pain was ground indelibly into the wood of the house where he grew up.

 _Rlly weird tracks like branches were dragged_ , Allison added.

 _Uhh brt with a book but p sure those runes are necromantic_.

_Um, Stiles, I thnk you mean necrophilic?_

_NO ALLY. NO. I DO NOT._

_Don’t touch anything_ , Derek sent, because even when it seemed safe to assume that nobody would be quite that stupid, sometimes they still managed to surprise him.

 _Good thing you warned me not to, that was totally my plan because I am an idiot_ , Stiles shot back.

 _Yw. If you see bones moving mtn ash should hold it stab silver in the glowing part or mugwort/lilac cinnamon and mushroom from a corpse. Eta 30_. If he didn’t get caught speeding.

_WHAT_

_DEREK_

_WHAT_

~~~

He made it in twenty-eight, and the general lack of running and screaming only reassured him a little bit. The “For Sale” sign on the front yard had an addition reading, “SOLD!” which was probably why Isaac had stopped by in the first place. The Whittemore’s old house across the street was still empty. Derek followed the low voices around the side of the house to the back porch, where Isaac lounged on the steps with his long legs sprawling, grinding up flowers, spice, and fungus in an actual mortar and pestle, a few sharp, sturdy sticks on the porch nearby, Allison tucked close beside him, paging through the Argent bestiary and wearing Isaac’s leather jacket, the one from his first shopping trip with Erica. If Erica were there she would make a _spectacularly_ bitchy face, Derek thought, and Boyd would shake his head slowly, and he wondered if Isaac missed them too. Derek nodded at his lazy wave, rolled his eyes when Isaac slid a look to Stiles and back and smirked, and went over to Stiles, who was cross-legged on the ground in his red hoodie, muttering over his notebook, the glyph book, and smears of chalky paint on dead grass under a patchy oak. It smelled mostly like Stiles, now, and crushed grass and the shopping list he’d texted, but the trace of rotting blood was unmistakable, even faint and old. More than a week; maybe two. The sheltering oak leaves must have filtered the rain enough to keep the circle from washing away completely.

He stood there and let all his senses search through the surrounding strip of woods. There was maybe an acre between this neighborhood and the cemetery where Isaac had spent so many nights working, where he’d met Derek for the first time, after the omega. Rabbits crept along the edges of lawns, mice and voles underfoot, a low heartbeat that was probably an opossum down the street; an owl overhead watched silently, and a tree nearby was full of sleeping squirrels. The neighbors on one side were out, on the other, watching TV. Normal night sounds, nothing out of place. Derek’s eyes fell to the bone-white glyphs and he scowled, touching Sitles’s shoulder to warn him he was there.

“Hey dude,” Stiles said, not startling, so maybe he’d noticed after all. “Took you long enough.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “I was out of town.” As if Stiles didn’t know.

“You just wanted to make us run around in the graveyard for you,” Stiles accused. “You give me an alternate for mugwort but not _mushroom from a corpse_? You’re lucky we had the local expert on rotting dead bodies semi-readily available to the public, Derek, seriously.”

Derek raised his eyebrows. “You’re welcome,” Isaac called from the porch.

“It didn’t have to be a human corpse,” Derek said blandly.

Stiles threw his head back with a groan of aggravation. Derek looked away to hide a smile. “Were you even serious about the bones? I swear I’ll stab you if you were fucking with us.”

“That’s a real incentive for me to confess,” Derek said, and Stiles mimed jamming a pen in his foot.

“I was serious about the bones, but I have no idea if this is related or not,” he admitted. “You said necromancy, things made out of bones seem like necromancy, Satomi mentioned that her pack has seen some skeletal constructs recently.” He flipped his hand languidly, inviting Stiles to draw his own conclusions.

“Ally, try ‘skeletal construct,’” Stiles said, loud enough for his voice to carry over the yard, and she started grumbling under her breath while Isaac stifled a laugh. “I’m not sure if that’s more or less creepy than ‘moving bones,’ but it’s more specific, at least. Satomi’s the Hill Valley alpha, right?”

“Yeah,” Derek said. “We had tea.”

Stiles snorted, so Derek shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket and decided it would have been a little pathetic, anyway, so at least he knew before he made the mistake of giving a stupid gift.

“I thought there weren’t any other packs around here,” Isaac said.

Derek looked over at him and saw the real question. “Most were killed by the Alpha Pack, after the fire. It was bad enough that Laura and I heard about it in New York. Satomi was so deep in hiding, I thought she’d left.” Or that she would never risk her whole pack for any new betas entering her territory pursued by both Deucalion and the Argents; same result. Boyd and Erica never had any hope of escape.

“Nice of her to show up _now_ ,” Stiles groused. “Not like we couldn’t have used some—”

“She has to protect her own.” Derek interrupted, and left it at that. He could tell them that she never expected any of them to outlive Gerard, especially Scott, who _dated his granddaughter_ and was so unsubtle with his abilities that Satomi had to stop an article from being published about how much the Beacon Hills lacrosse team had suddenly improved, but this was Scott's pack, and the Argent in question was right there.

Stiles held up a hand defensively. “Alright, alright. At least we got some intel. So how hard of a fight are we talking? On a scale from housecat to Chris Argent.”

Derek rolled his eyes. “I don’t know. I think it varies, and Satomi’s pack are pacifists.”

Stiles perked up. “So they’ll overestimate?”

“So they hired a mercenary.” Derek said dryly. Satomi had no issues with violence toward non-sentient things that couldn’t feel pain; some degree of practicality was necessary to hold a territory, given the realities of the supernatural world.

“Ah. Shit.” Stiles drummed his pen against his notebook. “Can we hire a mercenary?”

“Bad precedent,” Derek said. “Satomi’s pack is established, but we don’t have that luxury. Braeden would keep it quiet, maybe, if she were free, but the last thing we want to do is call attention to how weakly Beacon Hills is defended.” Stiles made an unhappy noise, but didn’t push. He turned a page in the reference book and scribbled another line in his notes.

Derek dropped to his haunches and reached out to hover a hand over what was left of a glyph, sprayed in chalky paint like they used marking roads for utility work. The whole circle was maybe three feet in diameter, with hand-sized collections of lines and swirls around the perimeter, almost like kanji. There was no hum. “Inactive?” he checked.

“Seems so,” Stiles confirmed. “Whatever was made here could still be running around, though, if it finds a good source of power.”

“It’s not like it’s been bothering anybody,” Isaac pointed out, “We would have heard about bone monsters.”

“Unless it went straight to Hill Valley,” Derek said. “It seems like too much of a coincidence to be unrelated.”

Derek sat back on his heels to study it. Some of the glyphs seemed familiar, but—and then he realized it _was_ like kanji, more than a little, with basic forms he recognized folding seamlessly into more complex shapes.

“I think I’m starting to figure out what’s going on here,” Stiles said. “These ones are for like, trapping essence, as far as I can tell, and that’s… corruption of some kind, but I can’t make out the details.” He waved at a few of the glyphs. “Some of the rest will be like programming, directive. I think one is ‘growing?’ Or evolution. But _this_ guy,” he pointed accusingly, “I _think_ is—”

“You can read these?” Stiles shot him an annoyed look for interrupting again. Derek pointed at one Stiles had identified. “You said this is corruption? It looks like a purification sigil. How do you get—”

“Yeah, no, that’s the base, but there’s the inversion, see? And then the shape on the tail there should be to channel, but that part’s smudged—”

“There’s nothing remotely like this in that book,” Derek said, and he would be impressed, if it weren’t for the mounting dread. “Without knowing the system or the intent, it shouldn’t be _possible_ to—”

“Yeah, well, I can. It’s just—it just makes sense. It’s not even that hard! You just have to figure out how the parts work together, like _basha_ or _keima_ both use a kanji for horse, paired with something else to change the meaning.”

The churn of dread in Derek’s gut worsened at having his suspicions confirmed. “What if there’s something like _baka_.”

Stiles scoffed. “What, where the symbols and meaning are completely unrelated? _Baka_ t you. I don’t think that we need—” and he froze. “What,” he said, voice suddenly hoarse. Wide eyes met Derek’s, and his breaths cut down to short, pained gasps, and Derek hated himself for making him _notice_.

“Stiles!” He leaned into Stiles’s space and unclenched the hand that had gone white-knuckled around his pen, spread out his fingers, held them up. “Stiles, you’re okay, this is real.” He shifted Stiles toward him, and Stiles’s other hand shot out to press against his chest; Derek kept his breath deep and even. “We’re in Isaac’s back yard, it’s Sunday night, you have an English test tomorrow.” Stiles sucked in a breath and looked betrayed. “Which you’re prepared for,” Derek reassured. “Count, come on. Count.” 

“What’s going on?” he heard Allison ask Isaac, worry as clear in her voice as Isaac’s tension when he answered.

“Ichi, ni, san, shi, go,” Stiles said, and laughed, an awful sound, scraping out of his throat. His eyes shut tight and flew open and his fingers twitched again, one-two-three-four-five.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Derek said fiercely. “It doesn’t mean it left _anything_ else.

“How do you know that, you can’t know that,” Stiles forced out between gritted teeth. “It had a direct line to my _brain_.”

“I do. I _know_. You’re still _you_.”

Even if Stiles had never learned Japanese.

They took a few minutes for Stiles to sit and recover, at least enough for him to be embarrassed, though he was still drawn and unsteady. “It’s cool, right,” Stiles said, not really laughing, lips twisted wryly. “Like The Matrix. Boom, upload. Knowledge.” He opened one hand next to his head for a slow-motion explosion.

“Maybe now you know Kung Fu,” Allison said, half smiling.

“Or maybe you do,” Stiles shot back, and the smile dropped off her face.

“We’ll watch out for it, alright? Now that we know there might be Easter eggs,” Isaac said, and she slipped her hand into his.

Derek stood up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s clean up and clear out.”

They hosed down the circle until it was illegible. Isaac and Allison took half the stakes and spears coated in fragrant gunk and headed to Scott’s, since he would be home from work soon. 

Derek went with Stiles back to the empty Stilinski house. His hand hesitated over the bag from the store, but he pulled out one of the tins, brought it inside, and in the warm light of the kitchen, they drank tea.


	17. What the Fuck Part 2: A Punch in the Gut

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has one of the very first scenes I ever wrote for this story! If I had known it would take 60k to get here… well, I still would have done it, but I would have been more intimidated to start. 
> 
> Warning for some very mild violence/gore.

The next day, Stiles blew off practice and showed up at the Hale house, and Derek did his dramatic appearing thing from wherever he had been doing whatever it was he did, frowning like he was concerned and confused and a little bit grumpy, and Stiles felt himself start to grin, irrepressibly, already a little lighter. “I thought you had practice,” Derek said, _totally just pretending_ to be annoyed, and Stiles’s grin burst out into the sunlight.

“Eh,” he answered, instead of any of a hundred truths. He might be avoiding Scott to avoid fighting with him, and occasionally feeling like he wanted to crawl out of his own skin, and worried about Kira, who wasn’t back in school yet—but it all boiled down to: he’d rather be here. “Am I disrupting your busy schedule? Should I have booked an appointment?” He leaned insouciantly back against the jeep, metal warm against his back.

Derek gave him a dry look and ran a hand through his hair, pulled out a leaf, and frowned at it, full alpha eyebrows, like he did when Erica dogeared pages in his books. Stiles’s heart did something stupid, but Derek didn’t seem to notice. “It’s fine, Stiles,” he said instead. “What do you need?”

“Your smiling face,” Stiles said, batting his lashes, smarmy, and Derek rolled his eyes, of course, but he _almost_ smiled. A little bit. Stiles could tell. It was basically the Derek equivalent.

“Out of luck, then,” Derek said, in the same phylum as a _joke_.

“I’ll wait.” Since you couldn’t stuff words back into your mouth when they came out embarrassingly earnest instead of blithely teasing, he steamrolled ahead. “So, hey, long time no see—” _literally_ like half a day, speaking of embarrassing “—what’s new in the woods?”

Derek’s eyebrows had been edging toward quizzical, but they settled back into the customary scowl that Stiles could now identify as worried. “No constructs,” he said. Stiles couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. It wasn’t like he _wanted_ anything horrible to show up angry – his days were generally better with an absolute minimum of terror and blood – but he wasn’t good at waiting.

“Well, I’ve got my poking stick and extra mush just in case, and—actually, let me give you a thing, first.” He popped the hatch on Roscoe while he was talking and rummaged around in his backpack for Derek’s copy of the map. It had survived a whole day in there pretty well, which was nice; he flattened out a corner. Turning to bring it over to Derek brought him abruptly toe-to-toe with the _sneaky fucking werewolf_ and he jumped about a foot in the air. “Asshole,” he swore, but of course _that_ got him a smile, nice and toothy. Ugh. He shoved the now-crumpled paper into Derek’s chest.

“What’s this,” Derek asked, already looking at it. It was a printout of the street map of Beacon Hills, with little red stickers dotted over it like moles.

“I’m pretty sure you’ve seen one before,” Stiles said, occupying himself with closing his backpack, and straightening his lacrosse equipment, and pulling out the witch bag, and not looking at Derek. “You could call it a two-dimensional table of terrestrial terrain. A geographic infographic. A—”

“Stiles.”

“—map. Of places to check for more circles.” This would probably be a good time for him to come clean about the GPS monitoring, and how it’s how he knew that Derek never patrolled around Isaac’s old place. Or that when he was copying glyphs from the _necromancy_ _circle_ into his notebook or even first figuring out protection wards it felt smooth, _practiced_ , and he was so tired, for so long, _months_ , like even sleeping he’d never slept. Or that the circle on the grass had been drawn in the same chalky spray paint that deputies used to mark crime scenes and road works, and Stiles knew exactly where they kept it, in the closet off the break room. He knew Japanese now, and Mrs. Yukimura seemed to think that—maybe it went both ways. Maybe it could know the things he knew. Maybe it used his hands. He risked a glance up, and Derek was staring at him.

“Stiles,” he said, softer.

Stiles looked down at his hands, started picking at a hangnail. “It’s where I would put them. So.”

Derek stood there, and stood there, and stood there, and Stiles pulled on a loose thread of skin until bright blood started welling up from the tear, and he grimaced. “I would like to try to not think about it,” he said.

“Okay,” Derek said after another long look, because of course Derek knew what that was like, of course he would understand how simultaneously necessary and hopeless an undertaking it would be. He scratched the back of his neck and glared a little into the trees. “I was thinking about checking the lake for bunyips,” he said begrudgingly.

Stiles looked up sharply. “Wow, okay, I know you’re just humoring me, but I will _absolutely_ jump on the chance to be inevitably proven right, because there totally is one, and I am in no way above rubbing it your face.”

“Yeah,” Derek said amiably, and Stiles almost crowed in victory before he finished, “Just like the kelpie,” with a stupid little smirk.

“Oh my god, fuck _off_ about the kelpie,” Stiles groaned. “You were right there with me getting covered with swamp trash all night.”

“Making sure you didn’t get yourself killed,” Derek said, like _that_ was the point. Stiles rolled his eyes, grabbed the witch bag, and set off toward the trees while Derek carefully laid the dotted map in the passenger seat of his truck before catching up.

 

The rain had swept the dust from the air and ground, swollen the creeks, left every leaf green and new under the shining sun. The trek up the slopes to the lake was faster, easier than it had been, with all the practice Stiles had been getting with hiking through the woods, and they felt more familiar around him, though the shadows under the trees were dark and watchful.

The touchstones they passed were all still burned with deep triskele, but while Stiles glared at the first few, frustrated with yet another total mystery he expected to try to kill them at some point, Derek just brushed his hand over them like usual. Used to it already, Stiles guessed. It was probably reasonable of him to assume that things intrinsically-though-mysteriously linked to the family crest tattooed on his back were less likely than most to actively have it out for him.

Some kind of warbly bird was singing off to the side as they broke through the pine stand and into the field by the lake, so Stiles was kind of distracted by that, trying to spot it, and he rebounded off Derek’s back with an “Oof,” and a “Hey, what—” when he stopped stock-still in front of him without warning. With peek around his tense shoulder, it was obvious why. “Huh,” Stiles said, and darted around him to get closer for a better look.

“Stiles, don’t—” Derek started, ineffectually, and caught up to him instead, grabbed the back of his shirt to pull him away, even though Stiles had stopped already, and it wasn’t like it was going anywhere. They stood close and stared at it from a few feet away.

Where the other marked triskele had been burned black, the one on the touchstone in the center of the field was silvery-white in the smooth groove of the pattern, pearlescent. As they watched, a trickle of green fluid the color of new leaves started to well up from the center of each spiral, glowing, running smoothly along the lines of the three spirals to where they met in the middle. Wisps of eerie green fire lifted from the gathering pool to meet and swirl together into the shape of a glyph, a curled, twisting fern, floating in the air.

“It’s pretty,” Stiles said, surprised.

“Smells like hawthorn,” Derek said, and Stiles could tell he was frowning, just from his voice. “The nearest hawthorn tree is miles away.”

“Do you seriously know all the—never mind. I’ll ask later.” Stiles watched the heatless flame lick at the air. “I don’t know what this is. I don’t recognize the symbol,” he said.

“Don’t touch it,” Derek said, but kind of absently. By rote. Distracted.

Stiles tilted his head to the side. “Yeah, obviously, _so_ obviously. It’s definitely a bad idea to touch it.”

They stared at it some more. “Hawthorn and elderberries,” Derek muttered. “There’s a rhyme—”

“I really, really want to touch it,” Stiles interrupted. Derek’s face was probably doing something worth looking at, but the glow was _so_ pretty.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Derek snapped.

“We should call Scott. Or Lydia,” Stiles suggested. “Let’s call Lydia.”

“Good idea. Do it.” Neither of them reached for a phone.

It looked like there was maybe something inside the glyph, something he was missing, that he’d been looking for. He could almost hear a faint snatch of song. Stiles raised a hand toward the light. Derek growled at him.

“Don’t touch it,” he bit out. “Damn it, Stiles, I will drag you back to the car by your _hair_ ,” he said, control slipped enough that he was lisping around elongated teeth.

“I swear to god, Derek, I’m not gonna touch it.” His fingers inched forward incrementally.  

“Stiles! Don’t _fucking_ touch it.”

It didn’t feel like anything, really, Stiles thought; a sensation of warmth, kind of a tingle, like licking a battery.

Derek snarled. “I’m going to track you down in the afterlife and kill you _again_.”

“Shit.” Stiles knew he was panicking, but vaguely, like it was trapped on the other side of a thick glass and he couldn’t quite look at it, still held fascinated by the floating glyph. The eerie brilliance of it intensified as it started to grow, floating higher and rotating on its axis. “This seems bad.”

Derek snorted. “Yeah, _you think_?”

Stiles thought distantly that he _should_ be fucking panicking. “This was not even on my top 100 list of ways we might die.”

“Isn’t it?” Derek asked, somehow both still furious and resigned. “‘Weird shit in the woods’ has to be at least top five.”

Stiles felt his face twist into a rictus that in some circumstances might be mistaken for a smile. “Good point, yes, okay, I called it, I’m a clairvoyant genius, that’s third.”

“What are the first two?” Morbid curiosity was just about the only option left, Stiles guessed. The glyph was spinning fast enough to blur into a bright green ball.

“Car accident, hunters,” he answered. “Four and five are ‘weird shit at school’ and ‘government cover-up.’”

Derek considered. “You should either consolidate ‘weird shit’ and move it to first or break it down into more specific categories,” he said. The light from the spinning globe was edging toward white.

Stiles let out a high, staccato laugh. “Thanks, Derek, helpful critique, I’ll get right on that. Top priority. If we _live_.”

They watched the glyph pulse above their heads, once, twice, and then silently burst in an emerald shockwave that raced through them to the edges of the clearing and vanished into the trees, leaving them swaying gently. “Wait, was that it? Maybe that was it.” Stiles looked around, suddenly _could_ look around, but Derek had already whirled to face the edge of the clearing, eyes glowing, claws out, and he was frozen again, every line of his body tense. Stiles ratcheted right back up to maximum dread. A figure stepped out of the trees. He wasn’t sure if he tried to move toward her or away, but in either case, his feet seemed like they were stuck, and now there were almost two yards between him and Derek. It shouldn’t make a difference, and yet it did; he felt more exposed, more alone, somehow colder. “God fucking fuckshits.”

If they’d seen her on the street in town, she might have passed for human. Maybe. A plump old woman, barefoot in a blue dress, grey hair in a loose bun. A kindly grandmother, delicately wrinkled, large bright eyes. Maybe a little too large. Her skin was pale like river quartz skimmed in algae, like the belly of a fish, and she moved very smoothly between moments of complete stillness.

“It’s true,” Derek said, nonsensically, suddenly fully human and stunned. His head twitched toward Stiles like he wanted to turn, but wouldn’t look away from the threat. “Stiles, listen to me,” he said, low and intent. “Be respectful but not polite to the fae, do you understand? Owe them _nothing_. _Tell_ them nothing.”

“Fae,” Stiles said flatly. “Like a fairy. Like a grants-wishes godmother fairy? Or a drag you to the netherworld fairy.” How was this a real question he needed an answer to today, fuck his _life_.

“Exactly,” Derek said, which didn’t help at all.

She stopped a few yards away, studying them both. When she spoke, her voice was strong and musical, echoing metallic, like a rung bell. It seemed to carry easily, without effort.

“A lonely wolf,” she said, evaluating Derek with a pitying twist of her lips before turning on Stiles. “And a dark jester.” She tutted. “My, my. Such guardians.”

“We’re not the only ones,” Stiles shot back, bristling.

“ _What_ did I _just say_ ,” Derek growled at him under his breath. Stiles winced.

The fae waved her hand, dismissive. “You are bound,” she said. Stiles tried to move his feet again; it was true. It felt like grass had woven across his shoes.

“Okay, yep, you got us. That’s a neat--that's neat. What do you want?” They still weren’t dead, so there was a chance he could talk his way out of this. Or stall until someone noticed they were gone. That… could happen. At least by lunch tomorrow. Probably. Call that plan D.

“You have kept the pact,” she announced, eyes locked on Derek. He was glowering defiantly back. “We are bound in turn.”

“Is that—are you sure?” Stiles was getting desperate. “A pact like, an agreement? I don’t remember signing anything.”

She shifted her gaze to him. “You did,” she said, “In _blood_ ,” and Stiles felt his stomach drop to his feet.

“Any offense was not intended,” Derek gritted out. “We ask no favors.”

Her lips pulled back to show a dense row of needle-sharp teeth. “No,” she said, “I must insist. There is a debt.” She settled an arm across her soft waist, supporting an elbow as she tapped her chin with long, opaline nails. Her gaze on Derek was heavy, searching. “But what payment,” she pondered, “When one has lost everything?”

Derek stiffened, and his eyebrows went thunderous. It seemed like his strategy was going to be silence, great. Stiles opened his mouth to try something, anything, but she just looked at him like a bug on a sidewalk she was deciding whether to squish or not and he—stopped. So much for plan… whatever they were up to. F, for Fucked. He tried wigging his feet again and got nothing, though the laces were loose enough that he thought he might be able to wrench free and leave his shoes behind, if he needed to. And do what, he didn’t know.

She looked thoughtfully into the canopy and poked at the litter of leaves moldering in the underbrush with one elegant toe. “Some things are best undisturbed,” she decided. “However.” The unblinking gaze drifted to Derek, then Stiles, then back to the ground. Her knees bent, dropping her gracefully toward the ground, where she picked one perfect acorn from where it had nestled in the leaves, above the earth. She examined it closely, suspended between two gentle fingers, before standing back up. The clearing was silent, Derek’s breaths barely disturbing the air, Stiles’s slightly more panicked but careful, wary. A breeze from deep in the preserve began as a faraway hush, just on the edge of hearing. It built slowly, pooling and spilling from tree to tree into a steady rush of shaking leaves and creaking branches. It swept toward them, gathering power. Stiles felt something like a chill as it approached, and something like the charge before the lightning strikes on the roof of the mall. The hair of his arms rose in goosebumps. One leaf skittered on the ground, another, and then the front hit all at once. The wind crashed across the grove, lashing the long grass, tearing leaves into the air, singing loud in their ears.  

The old woman was motionless, untouched by the wind while leaves jumped and trees swayed around her, eyes locked on the acorn. As it ebbed, letting leaves flutter to the ground, her head tilted almost imperceptibly. Her gaze snapped to Stiles. A smile grew slowly. “Your spark,” she said. “It may be a conduit for great magic.” Derek growled from low in his throat, but his sharp claws stayed frozen at his sides. The fae rotated smoothly toward him, grin predatory, delighted. “But of course, change is already in your nature.” Her hand closed around the acorn. She took one deliberate blink, and a milky film flooded her eyes like a membrane. It swirled as if moved by inner currents, lit as if by fire. A soft pale glow began to shine around her, and her feet lifted a few inches from the ground. “Your sister was bound,” she said, and the words seemed to echo, to reverberate through the trees and over the water. “She died very near the grove.” Derek’s face drained of color, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from hers. Wind stirred the leaves at their feet again, whispering, excited. The cold fire danced in her eyes.  The fae spoke again, with immense satisfaction. “ _She_ had a wish.”

In three dancing strides, the fae was before him, wild, gleeful, burning light stabbing brightest from her clenched fist. Delicate fingers reached up to steady Derek’s shoulder as the wind shrieked past, almost howling. Leaves tossed and cut fiercely in a whirlwind, but the space between them was calm. Her other hand drew back like a winding spring, shot forward in a blur. The whole fist punched through the skin and muscle of Derek’s stomach, burying itself to the wrist with a blunt squelch and spatter of blood. White fire raced across his skin, radiating from the messy hole out to his toes and ears and fingertips, burning like oil on water, and he cried out, clutched at her arm, claws scrabbling against rubbery skin and face twisting past human. The fae laughed, pulled her hand away, let him drop to his knees. “Paid to blood,” she announced, satisfied. She raised her dripping hand to her face, licked a rolling droplet from her forearm with a sharp tongue, and nodded. 

“You may call me again,” she said magnanimously. She winked over Derek’s shoulder at Stiles, brought her hands together, and was gone. The last eddies of wind faded. Abandoned leaves drifted to the ground, dazed. For a moment, Stiles was motionless, staring into the trees. Derek let out an agonized groan and collapsed from his knees to curl on his side, and Stiles tore his feet from the ground and raced toward him. 

He skidded through the leaves and grass next to him at the center of the clearing. “Derek!” he called. “Fuck, god damn it, let me see.” Frantic hands pulled back the ruin of his shirt, but Derek could only shudder on the ground, shift stuttering between human and wolf. Stiles stared at the unbroken plane of his stomach as hair and claws and teeth rippled and receded, fighting through his body in waves. Derek gasped in a breath, then another. “You’re okay, big guy, you’re okay, we’re okay.” Derek rolled over onto his back, finally unclenching his teeth, making fists with blunt fingers. He stared unseeing at the blue, unbroken sky. Stiles was torn between relief and frustration. “What the fuck was that,” he demanded, scowling first at Derek, then into the woods, still on his knees, throwing out a hand toward where she’d vanished. “What the fuck _was_ that!”

Derek took one more careful breath. He coughed. He smoothed one hand over his stomach again. A shiver raced through his whole body. He stretched out his fingers, shifted to claws, and pulled them back. “I don’t know,” he said, voice rough. He lifted his head just enough to peer up at Stiles. “Are you okay?”

“Am _I_ —I don’t know, Derek, I have kind of a papercut from one of the leaves, maybe. Some grit in my eye. Some blood on my shoes from _her fist through your intestines_.”

Derek dropped his head back, closed his eyes, let the ground hold him up. “Sounds like you’ll probably make it,” he said. “Okay.” He took a few more breaths. “It could have been worse.”

Stiles fell heavily back on his ass on the sun-warmed ground. His face started to spasm. A hysterical laugh broke through. He put his hands over his eyes, shaking with more sharp, incredulous laughter. “I hate you so much,” he groaned, “Oh my god, fuck. You’re not even wrong.”  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long break! Your kudos and comments sustain me <3
> 
> Anyone who’s followed my tumblr might at this point realize that my tagging system for the last… year… has been a private joke with, uh, myself. And now you! Thanks for reading :D


	18. Everybody Needs a Hobby

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Smooth as hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I live!!! Thank you all for your wonderful comments and patience during the hiatus. I finished my thesis, graduated, started a new job, and moved across the country — not in that order — but now I'm BACK TO WRITING and updates will be... okay, still slow, but HAPPENING.

The normal sounds of the woods slowly crept back in around them: the rustle of small creatures disturbing leaves under the trees, the gentle lapping of the water as ripples from the wind evened out against the land. Derek dragged himself upright and looked out over the lake. Even though the sky was bright, the water was dark, with an impenetrable mirror finish. He probed his abdomen through the tatters of his shirt while Stiles’s variably agitated voice rose and fell around him in a reassuring lull.

“We can’t fight a bunyip by ourselves,” he interrupted. “We’re going to need help.”

Stiles’s hand cut indignantly in front of his face. “What—why—were you even listening to what I was saying?”

“Yes,” Derek admitted, but Stiles scoffed.

“Forget about the stupid bunyip for five minutes, okay? It’s not going anywhere. Unlike that acorn, which—you’re still poking it. Is it still in there? Derek. Please tell me it’s not still in there.”

Derek prodded the healed skin with his finger. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think she turned it into fire.”

“Great. Great. That’s better, right? Is that better?”

“You just don’t want to watch me dig it out.”

“No _shit_ , I don’t want to—ugh. _Ugh_.” He eyed Derek’s torso like it took every opportunity to victimize him personally. “We could get an x-ray or something, if you want. Sneak into the clinic tonight.”

Derek shook his head. “No point. Anything left will get healed out on its own.”

Stiles made a face. “ _So_ gross. Okay, well, your body, your rules, man.”

“That’d be a first,” he said, and Stiles kind of choked on an unwilling laugh. After a few more fortifying breaths, Derek hauled himself to his feet. A hand out to help Stiles up from the ground became Stiles braced against his shoulder, holding him steady, a strong arm around his chest.

“Whoa, hey. Are you sure you healed all the way? You’re not like, bleeding internally?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.” Swaying back to vertical was difficult, but he managed.

“Yeah, sure, _that’s_ convincing,” Stiles said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here before she comes back.”

Derek made it to the cars under his own power, but when he climbed into the passenger seat of the jeep rather than the driver’s side of the Camaro, Stiles blessedly refrained from comment. He sank down into the stained and patched fabric and closed his eyes as Stiles dug a hoodie out of the back against the cool evening shadows, clambered into the driver’s seat, and coaxed the jeep through grating into gear. In some ways, the jeep reminded him of being on the subway in New York: the almost uncomfortable awareness of precarious machinery laboriously at work, the layered mix of scents from people over time, and the occasional rush of outside air, flapping in from the soft back. Unlike with most cars, you could always tell where you were by scent, in the jeep, even when the windows were shut. He could feel Stiles glancing at him in free moments as he drove, but It was more than healing exhaustion dragging him down, a bone-deep, soul-deep weariness, so he let himself lie back and track the shift from pine and deep woods to the asphalt and caged gardens of town.

Stiles didn’t break until they hit a stoplight. He shifted in his seat with increasing agitation, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel, until it almost burst out of him when the light turned green and Jeep jerked into motion. “What’s bugging you,” he demanded.

Derek opened his eyes to slits, just enough to convey the full force of his incredulity.

Stiles waved it off. “You know what I mean. What else?”

Derek breathed in, and out, and studied the water stains on the roof the Jeep. _Your sister died very near the grove_. He turned it over and over in his mind, but couldn’t find another angle that made sense of it. Their bond hadn’t been strong enough over the distance to give him any sense of her emotions when she died, just a foreboding, a pull that he was needed, and then wrenching emptiness it was impossible to get used to, no matter how familiar it had become. Before he’d known how it happened – who – he’d hoped she’d gone down fighting, that she’d been defiant, not scared. That she’d killed many hunters before wolfsbane got her, that she’d torn out the enemy alpha’s throat, that they’d died after her by seconds, so the spark passed to the interloping pack instead of Derek, or that it returned to the earth to wait for a wolf that was worthy. After Peter beat him to a pulp in the hospital with a crazed red grin, he’d just hoped it had been quick. Maybe that was too much to ask for. She’d needed him. He wasn’t there. Of course she’d have been right to be angry. “Did it sound to you like the fae watched Laura die and did nothing, or that Laura’s dying wish was to punch my guts out,” he asked. The jeep swerved hard. Derek calmly hovered a hand near the steering wheel until Stiles got it back under control enough to lurch into a gravel pullout on the side of the road.

“No. Derek, no,” Stiles said as they jolted to a stop. “Look at me. No. There’s no way she blamed you.”

“She had a wish,” he said distantly. “She had a wish. They chose to grant. Paid to blood.”

“Derek. Her wish could’ve been for someone to punch _Peter_ , who was _attacking her_ , and they never had a chance to collect so they passed it to you because you’re related to _him_.” Derek inclined his head noncommittally, which Stiles met with a glare and a shove at his shoulder. “Knock it off. No.”

Rather than argue, Derek scanned their surroundings. They’d stopped along a winding road between tight-knit neighborhoods, and the houses around them were small but set back from the road on large plots, rusting cars on steep, patchy lawns crowded by looming trees. It wasn’t on the direct route between his house and downtown, but Stiles had a weird sixth sense for avoiding speed traps.

Derek’s eyes traced the pattern of patchy rust leaking from the bed of the nearest pickup clinging to the rocky hill. He sighed, tasting the local smells filtering in.

And froze.

“You’ll make yourself crazy, wondering what-ifs,” Stiles was saying. “You can’t do that to yourself. You just have to—you have to trust that she loved you, that, that no matter what anyone says, it wasn’t what she meant, not deep down—”

“Shut up,” Derek said softly.

“I know what I’m taking about, okay? I think it’s safe to say that bat-shit crazy fairy doesn’t know you or your sister, and she _definitely_ didn’t—”

“No, Stiles— _Look_.”

Stiles’s mouth dropped open, then set in a grim line as soon as he noticed what Derek had smelled, cutting through the mouldering leaves, woodsmoke, and setting tar. A faint chemical smell was harsh on the back of his throat, but closer, deeper—it wasn’t all rust on the back of the pickup in the yard, or staining the ground under it. “Is that,” Stiles said.

“It’s blood,” Derek confirmed.

Stiles gagged and looked beseechingly toward the roof of the jeep. “Why? Why us?”

“We're just lucky,” Derek said. “Stay here, be ready to call your dad. I’ll check it out.”

“Uh— _no_.” Stiles grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him back from the door as he tried to leave. “Did you _forget_? You literally look like you murdered someone. I mean, maybe you’ll have that in common with whoever lives here and it’ll be an instant bonding experience, but most likely— _what are you doing_?”

Derek paused to glare with his arms half raised. “You just _told_ me to take my shirt off.”

“Warn a guy!” Stiles shrilled. “Oh my god. _Here_.” He banged an elbow on the door as he wrestled off his hoodie and thrust it in Derek’s direction. It was warm with his body heat, soft, and Stiles’s hair stood up ridiculously with the leftover static. Derek looked down at the dried blood and mud and grass still flaking off his torso. “Just put it on,” Stiles grumbled. “It’s big on me, okay? Don’t Hulk out of it and you’ll be fine.”

Wordlessly, Derek swiped at his midsection with the remnants of his shirt and tugged Stiles’s soft cotton hoodie over his shoulders, down loose over his waist. As he expected, it fit. It was fine. He didn’t expect Stiles to hop out and follow him up the long, steep, raggedly patched driveway, but he probably should have.

“Obviously,” Stiles muttered.

There was a faint sound of snoring coming from inside, one slow heartbeat, so Derek cautiously approached the truck and its faintly layered scents of old death and a questionably hygienic owner who liked cinnamon gum. “Human,” he pronounced.

Stiles yelped and fell back from trying to peer into the dusty windows of the garage.

“The owner is human,” he clarified. “The blood is animal.”

“There is a _jar of eyes_ in there,” Stiles said.

“ _What?_ ”

“We are _done_ here. This is a horror movie. I am _not_ dying like a stupid person in a horror movie.” The hair on the back of Derek’s neck stood up as Stiles backed slowly toward him down the uneven slope, sharp eyes scanning for threats from the house.

A particularly loud snore from the house cut off in a hideous noise.

“Get to the jeep. Now.”

Springs creaked, then floorboards.

“Why did we even get _out_?”

A faucet turned on.

Derek’s head jerked toward the foot of the driveway as a whining engine on the disused road slowed and started to labor. A beat-up Camry turned in and struggled on the hill. The pickup on the lawn hid him from view, but Stiles was out in the open; there was no way he hadn’t been seen already, and the jeep was in plain view next to the road.

A light turned on inside.

He swore under his breath.

“Oh god, no,” Stiles moaned, but he was already moving toward the car. Derek steeled himself and strode out to join him, baring his teeth only enough to fake an open, friendly expression while his claws itched in the pocket of his sweatshirt. The chemical smell was much stronger near the garage, but not enough to drown out the blood and rancid entrails. He turned toward Stiles enough to keep an eye on the house while Stiles faced the car.

“Don’t make that face, it’s creepy,” Stiles said, “Let me handle this.” The rictus of a smile Stiles was making wasn’t any better, but he flung a hand up and aimed one of his whole-body waves toward the car. “Hey, Coach!” he yelled, and sure enough, the driver’s side door of the car opened and the narrow-eyed, scowling face of his lacrosse coach appeared. Derek’s claws jabbed into his palms in surprise before he willed them back.

“Stilinski!” he barked, “What are you and your shifty older boyfriend doing at my dad’s house?”

“What? Coach! No, we—What?” Stiles floundered. “Your dad’s house?”

The coach rolled his eyes. “How many Finstocks do you think there are in this town?”

Stiles twisted around like he could find the camera. “At least… two?” he guessed.

“At _least_ ,” Finstock scoffed.

“Our mistake,” Derek said tightly. “We’ll just be going.”

“Wait a second,” Finstock said suspiciously. “Are you—hold on. Are you here about the Craigslist ad?”

“No,” Derek said, absolutely certain in a way he seldom was that they wanted no part of anything any Finstock would put on Craigslist.

“Maybe,” Stiles said warily.

“Ugh. I told him that nobody would buy this crap, but of course the weirdest kid in class has to go and prove me wrong.” Stiles batted Derek’s arm off as he tried to keep him away from the garage as Finstock approached it. With a grunt, a heave, and a squeal of rusting pulleys, Finstock rolled open the old mechanical garage door, and the long shadows of evening spilled in. Two bare bulbs buzzed and flickered as he turned on a light, and Stiles and Derek could only stare, transfixed, at what was revealed.

“Wow, Coach.” Stiles said. “That’s. Huh.”

Near the front, blocking the window Stiles had been peering in, sat a shelving unit of odds and ends – a jar of eyes, yes, white and black painted marbles of all sizes, surrounded by wooden posts and stands and snippets of leather, stained metal cans and bags of powder – while the back wall held a pegboard of dusty lawn and garden tools interspersed with shiny metal torture devices, or at least, that was how Derek was regrettably familiar with them. In the middle… something else. Somethings, all jumbled together, but disconcertingly turned to stare at the door.

A long-limbed foothill jackrabbit, or most of one, posed as if ready to leap from the ground, with brown and white speckled wings flaring from where its front legs should be. A little deer, flank faintly marred with a tire tread, menacing with slitted yellow eyes and a snarling mouth of coyote teeth. A skunk with stubby little antlers clinging awkwardly to a twisting treebranch covered with moss. “That one’s kind of cute,” Derek said.

“I like the cockatrice,” Stiles said, pointing to a lunging rooster half covered with scales.

“Stilinski, come on! TMI, kid, you ever heard of it? It means Too Much Information,” Finstock complained.

“Oh my god,” Stiles said, a blotchy flush rising on his neck. Derek caught his wild-eyed glance in his direction, and a quirk of his eyebrow was enough to send Stiles into a coughing fit trying to cover his laugh. “You’re so right, Coach,” he rasped out afterward. “My bad.”

Derek hid a smile by leaning in to examine a mountain lion that had been shot through the face with a .45 and not quite patched, probably courtesy of Chris Argent via the high school parking lot. Its elongated tail rose over its back and ended in the head of a gopher snake, and a goat bust was tipped sideways next to it on the ground. “Between you and me,” Finstock said, “I think the old man’s not handling retirement well.” His eyes darted around like the taxidermized animals would rat him out, and he hunched a little, twirled a finger by his temple, and whistled like a whippoorwill, two low short notes and a long high fall.

Derek looked at Stiles again, and Stiles had to press his lips together and look away, shoulders shaking. Derek fought back a smile of his own and glanced around the workshop again. The wicked-looking tools still threatened from the back wall, but underneath them, a long feather was tucked safely next to the wall, brown and speckled and longer than his arm. Fake, obviously, but it didn’t seem to fit in with any of the other projects.

More floorboards creaked in the house, and a light on the front of the house flooded the yard with a dim yellow glow. A few deadbolts turned, and the front door of the house creaked open. “Bobby?” a rough voice called, “Izzat you?”

“In the garage,” Finstock yelled back without turning away from Stiles’s ear.

When the man of the house shuffled down the crooked cement sidewalk to stand beside Coach Finstock, the resemblance was unmistakable. Derek had not known they made bath robes in Hawaiian print.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Finstock. I’m Stiles,” Stiles said, sticking his hand out. The elder Finstock pulled his fingers free from the wild nest of white hair around his bald spot and shook it.

“Stiles? That sounds familiar. He one of yours, Bobby?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You play basketball, Stiles?” 

“Um—”

“Lacrosse, dad, I coach lacrosse,” Finstock corrected with a grimace.

His dad rolled his eyes and turned to Derek. “What about you? You’re a Hale if I’ve ever seen one, _you_ must play basketball.”

Derek felt the flare of pain and tasted metal as he bit his own tongue. “I did,” he said. “Basketball and baseball.”

“There you go. See? That’s fine. Trip some Hill Valers for me, will you?”

Despite their proximity, Beacon Hills and Hill Valley hadn’t played each other in the regular season since the conference restructuring when Derek was in middle school. The rivalry had been legendary. “Sure,” he said. “Next game, I will.”

“Good!” Mr. Finstock rubbed his hands together gleefully and spread them out, welcoming, like Willy Wonka at the gates of the candy factory. “Well! You boys get the Craigslist ad? Come to see my critters? What do you think?”

Stiles and Derek shared another quick look. “They’re even better than we imagined,” Stiles said, and, well, that much was true. “Where do you get your ideas? They look so real.”

“They do, don’t they?” Mr. Finstock said, admiring his own handiwork on the deer with sharp teeth. “Mostly I just drive around town, find things on the road; I’m always looking for new material. Like a shark.”

“Can’t let your creativity stagnate, definitely. True artists always have to keep moving forward, trying new things,” Stiles agreed, laying it on way too thick.

“What? No, that’s stupid. I mean I’d like to find a shark. To taxidermy.” The elder Finstock and Stiles squinted at each other.

 As far as Derek could tell, he was serious. “A shark.”

“Yeah, you know. Shark. Big teeth, smooth skin. Gills, fins.”

“Live in the ocean,” Stiles said, a futile attempt to clarify.

“Or lakes, I guess. Lake sharks,” Mr. Finstock said.

“Lake sharks?” Stiles repeated.

“You’d like to find _a shark_ on the side of the road,” Derek said flatly, because he refused to deal with the other thing.

“ _Lake sharks_ ,” Stiles said to himself.

Mr. Finstock frowned. “Why would a shark be on the side of the road?”

“I don’t know what you see in this guy, Stilinski; he seems kind of dim,” Coach Finstock chimed in.

“He gets by on his looks,” Stiles agreed absently. “But—”

“ _Stiles_.”

“—I didn’t think sharks were smooth,” Stiles said.

“Maybe _lake sharks_ are smooth,” Derek snapped.

Mr. Finstock turned his frown toward his son. “What have you been teaching these kids, Bobby? Boys in this town don’t even know sharks are smooth?”

“Economics and lacrosse, dad. There’s no sharks in lacrosse.”

“Well, maybe there should be.”

They were still arguing about it when the sheriff’s patrol car pulled up outside the garage, lights flashing, because the neighbor across the street had called in suspicious prowlers when Stiles and Derek had left the jeep and crept up Mr. Finstock’s hill.

“Boys,” the sheriff said, very evenly, after sorting things out with the Finstocks and pulling Stiles and Derek out into the driveway.

“Hey, daddy-o,” Stiles said with false brightness. “Nothing like a good mystery solved, right? The Roadkill Bandit, case closed. Well before curfew, I might add. With minimal county resources.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, unimpressed, and, pointedly, “Nice shirt, Derek.”

Derek stuck his hands in the pocket to avoid crossing his arms over his chest. “Sir,” he said.

“Stiles, since you’re so keen to help out with police work tonight, how about you come down to the station with me and help Deputy Parrish with his report?”

“Dad!—”

“I’m sure Derek wouldn’t mind driving your jeep back home for you. Would you, Derek?”

Stiles’s shoulders slumped in defeat, but Derek waited for his small nod. “Sure,” Derek said. “No problem.” As Stiles handed over his keys, he darted a glance at Derek’s midsection and met his eyes in silent question. “It’s fine,” Derek said softly, “Don’t worry about it.”

“Easy for you to say,” Stiles scoffed. When the sheriff cleared his throat, Stiles jumped away as if scalded. Derek rolled his eyes, said goodnight, and turned away from the warm light of the garage full of oddities.

Night had crept in around them, and it swallowed him up a few steps down the hill. The sharp bite of the steel keys in his hand carried a weight like his last tether to the earth, and part of him felt like he was one deep breath and careful tread from leaving no trace at all with his passing, like all his sharp edges could dissolve into the waiting air like mist and let him float away.

Stiles and his dad were soft silhouettes in the driveway when he looked back, standing close, the tension between them diffused by his distance. One of them raised a hand, and the Finstocks inside waved back. The jeep coughed to life, and he left them behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> <3


	19. Poker Face

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which we catch up with some old friends, some innocent bystanders, and someone else. Stiles does his homework.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some tiny flashbacks for POV character, but as far as I can tell no warnings apply!

Derek must have made it at least to Stiles’s house without incident, because Roscoe was neatly parked in the driveway when Stiles finally made it home that night, dropped off by a deputy after takeout for dinner at the station. Stiles made a show of digging his school bag out of the back of the jeep and waved his thanks as the new guy drove off. He grabbed his baseball bat – because it had been that kind of day – and creeping around his house to the back door. “Derek?” he asked his yard, not optimistically, but he scanned the darkness under the trees for idiot werewolves all the same. After a tense minute hardly breathing, balanced on the balls of his feet, ears straining through silence broken only by the faint clinks and murmurs of his neighbors washing the dishes, he gave up and fished the box with the spare key out from behind the weathered bench and dusty planter on the back deck. The box seemed heavy when he picked it up. The reason why was soon obvious. His keys were inside, all of them, to Roscoe and his house and Scott’s and the crowded keyring of half the other places he’d tricked his way into owning. He stared down at the sprawl of illegal hardware store copies and realized he hadn’t thought twice about handing over the whole mess, hadn’t considered how Derek would get them back to him; he’d just known he would. “I never showed you the spare key box, you creeper,” he said to no one, and turned on all the lights downstairs as soon as he was inside.

His phone still had battery, and signal, and no new messages. He checked again after dragging in the garbage cans he’d put out that morning.

Not that he was worried, he told himself, and shoved it back into his pocket.

He made a face as he switched over a faintly musty load of laundry he’d forgotten in the washing machine that morning, shivered at the feel of the cold, heavy fabric, jarred back to the memory of the way his fingers had clenched on his icy soaked jeans in a blinding white room.

He flung the last of the laundry into the dryer and viciously slammed the controls to start it spinning. Restless pacing brought him into the kitchen, where his eyes skirted the table, found the cupboard with the tea.

He needed to… listen to music or something. Play Warcraft. It had been a while. The Blood Elf Mage he was levelling had a cool racial ability: area of effect silence with a spell casting interrupt. That kind of thing would be useful in real life, he thought, a little resentfully. Maybe when the fae had been holding the acorn – but she hadn’t chanted or anything. Voiceless casting? And did punching count as a cast? Or was it a touch attack with magic damage? Like that Dungeons and Dragons spell, what was it…

Oh. Touch of Death.

It was too easy to imagine, back in the memory of the wind screaming around him as Derek jerked silently, helplessly, Stiles tearing his feet free from his shoes, the shock of the cold grass, and reaching out desperately with his spark to do something, anything, and feeling a faint, sluggish response from the stray traces of mountain ash clinging to the grass around him from days and days of throwing circles in the sunshine not carefully gathered back up, but even as he flung out his intent there was nothing he could _do_ with it, no way to protect him, protect anybody; it was already too late, the soft, choked sound of surprise Derek made somehow carrying over the screaming wind, his blood dripping on the cold grass, and she was gone, but that moment before Stiles heard Derek groan, saw him breathe, felt him whole—it was too easy to imagine his stupid pretty eyes gone blank, sightless. Still.

But, no. She was gone. Everyone was okay.

They thought.

For now.

He deliberately went to the refrigerator, pulled out a can of something caffeinated, and drank half of it on his way upstairs, turning lights on along the way. It joined the forest of other cans on his desk, next to his computer, while he stared at it blankly for a few minutes more.

The AP environmental science textbook lurked accusingly on the corner of his desk, but he’d probably learned all he was ever going to about estuaries, the amazing liminal habitats where fresh and salt water mixed in unique ecosystems that somehow both filtered pollutants and provided ideal nursery grounds for many diverse species to hatch their young. That sounded kind of like raising kids in sewage treatment plant, to Stiles. Lydia’s mom was threatening a class field trip to the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge, which would definitely end with somebody getting eaten by a kelpie.

He pulled out his phone.

 _Thanks for getting my car back in approximately the shape it was_ , he typed out, and deleted.

 _Let me know if you’re still alive or whatever_.

Deleted with _prejudice_. He spat out the pen cap he’d been chewing on and glared out the window like Derek was waiting outside.

_I bet lake sharks have poisonous spines like platypi_

Sent.

There were three other piles of homework on his desk, a browser full of open tabs on his laptop, and a safe of half-read grimoires in his closet. At least a few of those tabs were for bed and breakfasts in the Thames valley that might have an owner named Dave; he should—he really should close those. In the window with the flat satellite map of Beacon Hills scattered with glowing green dots, one dot broke away from Deaton’s clinic and arrowed toward two cozy lights at the Argent house. Stiles thumbed to another conversation on his phone.

 _So heads up fairies are real, met one in the woods, she punched thru Derek’s abs and vanished_ , he texted Lydia.

 _God damn it, Stiles, we have an AP environmental test tomorrow_ , she sent back immediately, because Lydia was a person with reasonable phone awareness but unreasonable concern for everybody’s GPAs.

 _It’s enviro, Lydia. Your mom is the teacher_.

_That just means I’ll never hear the end of it if I get a question wrong._

Lydia’s mother wasn’t a likely new source of mayhem and material harm, though, so he spent a half an hour or so giving her the details, slouching lower and lower in his chair, kicking one foot to spin back and forth, chewing on a pen cap, scowling at the lonely dot in his GPS program unmoving in the woods outside the Hale house. His suddenly phone buzzed with a text not from Lydia, and he sat up so fast he almost tipped over his chair. But it wasn’t Derek.

 _hey batman_ , it read.

Unknown number.

The pen cap fell out of his mouth.

 _holy shit_ , he typed back. _Catwoman?_

_:3_

He grinned back. The lack of emoticons on the prepaid flip phones she and Boyd were using had to be killing her. _Hey! How are you? Everyone good?_

 _ye,_ she sent back immediately while she kept typing, because Erica was his favorite. _evryone here is gr9, bc we arent on a hellmouth. u shld try it._

 _Sounds nice,_ he admitted, and made himself take a deep breath. If she and Boyd and Cora were fine, it couldn’t be anything too bad. Still, the Díaz pack took their safety seriously enough that most of the pack stayed up high in the mountains, with only a few members rotating through a base of operations in the nearest small town with cell service. _So, you sneak out? Steal a donkey for a joyride?_ he tried.

 _U hear from D tday?_ came in at the same time. Stiles felt his stomach clench. 

_We ran into some bs in the woods and he left his phone in his car, but he was ok a few hours ago._

_Truck but kinda yah._

He spat out the can tab he’d picked up at some point. If Erica was in the valley without permission Cora was going to kill her, if the Díaz alpha didn’t first. _???_ he sent, and then, just to be sure, _WHY_.

 _I thought I felt something_ , she sent back slowly, almost reluctantly. _When was the fight?_

_You FELT something?_

_But u said hes ok, so…_

Stiles was dangerously close to glaring a hole through his phone. He stabbed the call button. Erica picked up on half a ring. “Stiles, I don’t have enough minutes left on my drug lord burner phone!”

“Then you better start talking, asshole! You can’t just catface at me and drop a bomb like that!”

“You said he was fine! It was just a second, and nobody else noticed, so—”

“You were certain enough to _hijack a car_.”

“Get off my dick, I just borrowed it! Alejandro loves me.”

“I need a second opinion. A sane one. Is Boyd there? Boyd!” he yelled.

There was the sound of a brief scuffle. “Hi, Stiles,” Boyd said, deep and smooth and faintly bemused, and fuck, Stiles missed him too. “What happened this afternoon? Did he get his ass kicked worse than usual?”

“There was some kind of fae,” Stiles said. “He healed, but there was magic involved—it was all blah blah, blood debt, threats threats, then bam! Fiery fist through the abs.”

“ _Through_ the abs?” Erica was muffled in the background. “Gross.”

The line reverberated with Boyd’s thoughtful bass hum. “Maybe the magic boosted an echo down the old pack bonds.”

“What, like nerves firing to a phantom limb, except connected to someone else?” Magic interference of some kind, like microphone feedback too close to a speaker. “Sure, maybe.” Why not? He didn’t know if pack bonds would work like that, but he didn’t know that they wouldn’t. Over four thousand miles, though—Derek said he couldn’t even feel Laura from California to New York, and their bond had to be one of the strongest possible.

“What did you do to piss off a fae?” Erica yelled, distant like Boyd was holding the phone away from her, “What did it look like? Was it a dryad?”

“Oh come on, you guys met the dryads too?”

“Dryads wouldn’t do fire, but don’t mess with them either,” Boyd said. “We’re out of minutes. We’ll meet up with Cora for the night, so text her when you—” and the call disconnected.

Hmm.

Stiles tapped his phone against his hand, glanced at the unmoving green dot at the Hale house again.

He tried to imagine for a moment what it would be like to feel pack bonds, to reach through his mind or whatever and feel the reassuring presence of Scott’s puppyish happiness, Isaac’s guarded hope, the steady mental susurrus of Lydia at work. He’d asked the betas about it, of course, and they’d all said Derek didn’t bleed into the pack sense much, but none of them had anything like Derek’s lifetime of experience interacting the intangible connections that bound werewolf packs together. When he was alpha, he would’ve wanted to hide how scared he was, how unsure, and project a lot of confidence with his raw new power that in retrospect probably contributed to his freshly turned wolves’ swaggering dickishness.

Now, though, he would be—sleeping? No, that didn’t feel right. Running around like an idiot, that was more likely. Or walking, maybe, a careful survey of his territory, ghosting through silent streets, wary attention wandering without an immediate threat. If he closed his eyes, he could almost see Derek’s graceful shadow slipping by quiet houses full of sleeping families—Kira’s neighborhood, for some reason—his task almost engaging enough to distract him from the ache in his chest, the cavernous loneliness like a sinkhole under his patched and crumbling foundations, waiting to swallow him up.

This fantasy was starting to feel awkwardly voyeuristic. Not something that usually bothered Stiles, but. _Go get your phone_ , he yelled at the Derek in his mind, and perfectly imagined his confused frown before he shook his head, let it go.

Oddly, Stiles felt a little better. If the falcon punch that afternoon had made Erica and Derek’s connection flare through some remnant of a pack bond but she hadn’t felt anything since, he probably wasn’t dead.

In that case, he should study.

But when he picked up the textbook, the red notebook full of glyphs slid toward him from the teetering pile underneath. So.

An hour later there was a stack of glossy blow-ups in the printer tray, smudged chalk on decaying leaves or sparse grass. Stiles shuffled through them as his feet took him to the half-covered corkboard with his map of careful stickers in the center. One by one, he added them to the puzzle. With each press of a thumbtack he pinned down a thought, and the haze of static slowly settled, connections unspooling with the bright yarn. When it was finished, he stepped back and looked for patterns.

 

~*~

 

That rare feeling of focus hadn’t dissipated by the time he swiped off his morning alarm. He was sorting out his books for the day when his dad knocked on the door. “I’m up,” he yelled, but the door opened anyway.

“Stiles! Get—oh, hey, you are up, look at that. Big day? Or—did you sleep alright?”

“Test first period,” Stiles said quickly, before his dad’s face could crease too much with worry. He was awarded with a wince of sympathy.

“Good luck, kid. Make sure you eat breakfast.”

“Thanks, dad.”

That should have been the end of it, his dad turning away with half a smile, but instead he stopped, looking pensive, with a hand on the door frame. “Stiles, about last night…” His eyes roamed around the room, catching briefly on the corkboard plastered with runes and yarn, then sliding blankly over it. He refocused with a blink when Stiles stepped in front of it.

“Dad?”

He shook his head as if to clear it. “Why don’t I ever see Danny around here anymore? Are you two still friends?”

“Danny Maehalani? Yeah, sure, I mean. We’re not _not_ friends. We’re friendly. He just won’t be my lab partner since—” since that time Stiles had used studying as a flimsy pretext to bribe-slash-extort him into hacking Allison’s cell phone records and consorting with a suspected felon “—we got a B from Harris last year.”

“A B is pretty good,” his dad… argued? What was happening. “Maybe you should ask him again. Or, you know, he could come over to… hang out.”

“What is happening,” Stiles said, on the off chance that saying it out loud would bring him an answer.

“Is he dating anybody?” His dad looked almost as awkward as Stiles felt, and a tiny bit, weirdly… hopeful.

“Oh my god, dad, no,” Stiles said, and immediately had to backtrack as his dad opened his mouth with determination. “No, yes! He is. Definitely dating someone. He’s back with his ex. Dramatic, epic romance, overcoming all odds, you know how it is—deliriously happy, no chance at all for burgeoning new… lab partnerships.”

“Oh,” his dad said. “That’s too bad.”

“I’m gonna grab breakfast on the way to school,” Stiles said, though he still hugged his dad on his way out and told him to be safe.

“Be good,” was the rote response, but it still made Stiles feel like the worst son in the world. He waved carelessly over his shoulder so he wouldn’t have to watch the unhappy lines around his dad’s mouth dig in a little deeper.

The coffee shop by Derek’s place wasn’t exactly on the way, but he had time. Brent and Gina were working, and they said Derek had been on a bench outside half an hour before they usually opened at five, ordered three grilled cheese roast beef sandwiches when they let him in, and demolished half a pastry tray of crumble-top muffins while the grill warmed up. “Well, thanks for looking out for him,” Stiles said, and spent a few minutes talking about Gina’s sister’s music camp before snagging one of the fresh batch of muffins to eat as he sped to class.

Stiles was done with his test with ten minutes to spare, which he spent pretending to look it over and avoiding Lydia’s attempts at an eyebrow conversation. At the bell he was off like a shot and didn’t stop till he got back to the jeep, scattering the little flock of crows that hung out in the parking lot on his way.

 

~*~

 

The clinic was quiet, as he’d thought it would be—the front lot empty before routine appointment hours, the caged animals quiet, having just been fed. From the outside, when Stiles looked out of the corner of his eye, the walls held a faint sheen of iridescence, the wards so dense the air itself felt thick. He raised a finger to touch the gently undulating border and sent ripples echoing across the surface. The door handle pulsed faintly under his hand, and the chime when it opened reverberated at an odd frequency just outside of his hearing. The reception counter running the length of the waiting room was another wall of both material and immaterial defense. Deaton appeared in the hallway behind it, peeling off a pair of latex gloves.

“Mister Stilinski,” he greeted neutrally. “You’re here early.”

“Hey, Doc,” Stiles drawled back, “Yeah, free period; you know how it is.” Deaton nodded back as if either of those things were true. “I’ve got some questions for you.”

“In that case, I hope that I can be of service,” Deaton said, and made no move to let him in.

Lifting the hinged section of the rowan-core counter gave Stiles a faint feeling like his ears could pop, a pressure from the set circle of solid mountain ash around the back half of the clinic straining to snap closed. Deaton’s spine may have relaxed just a fraction as Stiles let it shut. “Yeah, I hope so too,” he said. When Deaton didn’t usher him further into the clinic, Stiles leaned back against the counter.

“This may sound kind of random, but do you know anything about skeletal constructs?”

Deaton’s eyes were steady on Stiles. “Necromancy,” he said. “That’s dangerous magic. Dark.”

“I mean, that seems to be something pop culture pretty much agrees on,” Stiles said easily, scratching a hand idly through his hair. “Outside of the Addams family.”

“For good reason. As I find myself more inclined toward work with living creatures, you can assume I’m not an expert. Surely the Argent bestiary has an entry on the subject.”

Stiles was almost impressed at that level of misdirection. He flashed his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “Oh, sure, if you think a recommendation that silver and yew be put through the hearts of all suspected witches in the area is all the information you need. Personally, I’d like a few more options, since even if I had a list of every magic user in the county, running around stabbing people with hand-crafted stakes sounds like the kind of thing my dad wouldn’t like.”

“I suppose hunter wisdom can be limited in its focus,” Deaton acknowledged. “Why the sudden interest?”

“I guess you could say, a little bird told me that Hill Valley was having problems, so I’d like to know how we could help.”

Deaton’s eyed narrowed the tiniest fraction. “There is another pack established in Hill Valley. If they haven’t requested assistance of yours, any attempt to interfere is unlikely to be taken well.”

“What if they do? I’d like to be prepared. Besides, Hill Valley isn’t far from here. What if their problems don’t stay local? It could be dangerous for Beacon Hills.”

“Since there haven’t been any issues here, I think we can safely assume that all appropriate precautions are being taken, Stiles. Their alpha is very experienced. You shouldn’t worry about other territories; there’s no sense borrowing trouble.”

Stiles chewed on his lip, but he couldn’t bite back the response that deserved. “Yeah, you know, that doesn’t at all sound like a philosophy that will get your whole pack burned to death by rogue hunters that had always before then been other people’s problems.”

Breaking through Deaton’s unflappable façade was gratifying as always, but Stiles felt like kicking himself. He held up his hands in the face of Deaton’s banked fury.

“I’m just saying,” he said, and tried to make it sound apologetic. “It’s not very neighborly.”

“It’s being handled, Mr. Stilinski,” Deaton said coldly.

“By doing what? I just want to know. Maybe I can _help_.”

“That’s very admirable, I’m sure, but you can’t put a circle of mountain ash around the whole town. The best thing you can do is stay safe. Stay inside. Stay out of the woods.”

Stiles nodded along, frowning, as if he were seriously considering Deaton’s proposal. “So, mountain ash stops them?” he asked. Deaton sighed.

“A ring of mountain ash of sufficient strength might hold a construct, temporarily.”

“Interesting, interesting. Relatedly, I think I need some more mountain ash.”

“You can’t be low already,” Deaton said flatly. “What have you been using it for?”

Stiles waved his hand dismissively. “Just, you know, circles and stuff. Practice.”

“Practice,” Deaton repeated. He cocked his head, assessing. “I must admit, I am surprised that Derek has been willing to humor you in an effort like that.” With great effort, Stiles just barely managed to refrain from addressing how little Deaton actually knew Derek at all. “I would hope you know that ‘defending’ yourself from a single friendly shapeshifter will hardly prepare you for a dangerous confrontation.”

Stiles was hit by a barrage of memories: Peter’s snarling mouth and crazed red eyes, spit flying through the flimsy mesh of the metal door between them; Matt’s face twisting as he waved the gun at Scott, Jackson slithering behind him; Boyd’s shoes staining red in the softly lapping water of the loft. Standing in a dingy back alley, alone, helpless, panic high in his throat and a gritty fist full of nothing, for all that he knew. He swallowed it back. “If I’ve learned anything from Coach Finstock, it’s that practice is the best way to suck slightly less. Sometimes it’s just practice for something that doesn’t seem relevant, like how I have to run laps as practice for sitting on the bench.”

After another narrow-eyed look, Deaton responded. “I am of course willing to supply any necessary materials to Scott’s pack that would help in safeguarding this town against threats.” Stiles didn’t think he was imagining where the stress fell in the middle of that sentence. “If you’ll wait here just a moment.”

Stiles put on a lopsided smile that dropped as Deaton disappeared into the back rooms. He leaned back against the rowan gate, drummed his fingers absently on the counter. With the latch undone, he found he could lift and drop the gate just enough for the circle to pop closed and strain open with some interesting interplay between the audible sounds and the rippling shiver of magic, especially to the rhythm of the first Lady Gaga song to start playing in his head.

“If you’re _quite_ finished.” Deaton shook the bag of mountain ash he was holding out in Stiles’s direction the same way he jingled cat toys, but more annoyed. Stiles used to feel bad about making him clench his jaw like that.

“Oh, that’s great, thanks,” he said with another fake smile. 

“Perhaps you should get back to school,” Deaton suggested.

“Sure, yeah,” Stiles said, trying not to sound dubious. “But hey. First. Just one more thing.” Deaton gestured for him to continue as if he weren’t nearly tapping his foot in impatience. Stiles looked him dead in the eye. “Do you think you would have clued me in at any point in the last six months if there was a real chance that I could be possessed by an evil Japanese fox?”

Deaton went still. “Ah,” he said.

Stiles sucked in air through his teeth. “So that’s a no,” he guessed.

“I tried to warn you,” Deaton said.

“Oh, with the—‘A kind of darkness around your hearts?’” Stiles applied air quotes liberally, as was warranted. “That’s not even worth partial credit.”

“You have to imagine yourself in my shoes,” Deaton said.

 “I’m pretty sure you’ll find that I actually don’t have to do anything you say,” Stiles disagreed. Deaton’s eyes widened just a hair, but he recovered fast.

“Telling you more wouldn’t have served any purpose,” he said. “There was no way for any of us to know exactly what the risks were. Besides, even if you had, would you have let it change anything? Would you have let your father die on the roots of the Nemeton?”

 “You must have thought it would make a difference, or you wouldn’t have kept it to yourself,” Stiles pointed out. “Just a heads up would have been fine. You know, ‘Hey, by the way, the next few months might be cloudy with a chance of _mind control_.”

“The situation was unheard of. The nogitsune was part of that tree long before I came to Beacon Hills—it might not have been interested in or even capable of taking another host. I had hope that a true sacrifice, a pure sacrifice, would be enough to change the heart of the Nemeton. Enough, perhaps, to use the power of the darach’s murders to tie the five-fold knot in a different pattern. To kill the parasite by cleansing the host.”

Stiles scratched at his jaw. “Let’s suppose for a second that that plan ever had a chance in hell. It sounds like it was kind of lucky for you that she just happened to take our parents. What a crazy, random happenstance that the true sacrifice you needed was suddenly very motivated at exactly the right time to let you drown him.”

“I would never wish harm to Scott or Melissa, Stiles. Nor to your father.”

“Uh-huh. But maybe you would, through careful and specific inaction, allow them to come to harm.”

“If you think I could do anything more against the darach than I did, you’re giving me too much credit. I am sworn to defend the people of this town,” Deaton said.

“Oh, it’s a ’For the greater good,’ then, okay. I get it. I mean, I don’t. But I can see how you could believe that justifies anything.” Stiles shoved off from the rowan wood barrier. “Guess, what though.” He raised a finger. “It doesn’t.” He jabbed it in Deaton’s face for emphasis. “It was a dick fucking move.”

Deaton didn’t try to deny it. He may have even shown the faintest tinge of regret. “We don’t have to be enemies, Stiles,” he said. “We want many of the same things.”

Stiles stepped back and crossed his arms. “Right now, we better both want you to show me everything you have on the constructs. You’re on thin ice.”

Deaton studied him for a long moment before standing aside and gesturing him into the back. “You seem different,” he said.

Stiles breezed past him like he knew where he was going. “Yeah, well,” he said, “I’m awake.”

 

Afterward, Stiles carefully eased a plain manila folder full of Deaton’s records of the rune circles into the protected space between two of his textbooks and zipped up his bag. A pinch of mountain ash sparked between his fingers to remove any strange scents before he climbed back into the jeep.

He didn’t know when he’d learned that one. Where. He tried not to think about it.

He was back at school in time for fourth period. He had an outline due.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I wrote legit eight different versions of that convo with Deaton. Thank you for your patience!!!!

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are very very welcome, including concrit! I am also [on tumblr as anefan](https://anefan.tumblr.com/) for all my teen wolf and story-related stuff :)


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